$7 million in federal funding coming to Georgia to battle opioid epidemic

ATLANTA - U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) announced last week that $7 million in federal funding is coming to Georgia organizations in an effort to combat the opioid epidemic.  

Emily Ribblett is the director of education of one of those organizations, the Georgia Council for Recovery. She says even after pandemic isolation ended, opiod deaths are still rising in the Peach State.

"It's not a pandemic phenomenon at all," she said. "It's the numbers are not going down."

Ribblett wrote the grant proposal for the funding, which will go toward reducing those deaths.

"We're going to be able to touch a lot of lives with a little bit of money," she said.

According to data from a recent high intensity drug trafficking area summit, overdose death among those in Georgia ages 15 to 19 increase 163% from 2019-2021. And deaths in that age group involving opioids increased 289% in that same time period. 

Ribblett says a big chunk of the $7 million will go towards trainings for students and those who interact with them daily.

"Family members, clergy it could be youth groups, school resource officers, school counselors, school nurses," she said. "Whoever they feel that they can have that conversation with in a trustful way where they don't feel any stigmatization or shame or anything. So that was critical for me in my recovery."  

Ribblett developed the training from her own experience recovering from opiod addiction. She's been in recovery for more than eight years. But she says $7 million isn't a whole lot when dealing with something as widespread and as fatal as the opioid crisis. 

"We're finding that more and more individuals are starting to experiment with substances, even vaping, at younger ages," Ribblett said.

About 44 recovery organizations across the state will be eligible for the trainings, which Ribblett says should be implemented in these groups within a year.