Goodnews Bay, Alaska has a small population base with a total of 454 tribal members with about 70% living within the village. Opioid use and addiction have become an exploding problem within our small community with five deaths within the past year alone (three men and two women). People historically had started on pain-relievers for legitimate pain and quickly develop addiction to those opioid-based medications. When pulled off of the medications, they have turned to other related black-market drugs (non-prescribed Fentanyl, heroin, etc.). Alaska has remained at the top half of the rankings for opioid-related deaths. “Preliminary numbers show that 342 Alaskans died from overdoses in 2023, a 40% increase over 2022 totals, according to the state Department of Health.” Further, “More Alaskans died from an opioid overdose last year than ever before, according to preliminary data, and the state reported the nation’s highest per capita increase in opioid overdose deaths.”
Another way of looking at this is that the people of Goodnews Bay make up only about six-hundredths of 1% of the population yet, with our five deaths, we make up 1.5% of all opioid deaths in Alaska. In other words, Goodnews Bay, in this past year, had nearly 24 times the number of deaths by opioids than the rest of Alaska- and, as just stated, Alaska has the fastest growing per capita increase in opioid deaths in the nation.
For all of this loss to our community, one would assume that we would be the recipient of frequent visits from addictions and grief counselors and educational programs in the school for the youth (one of the victims of opioid death was only 15 years old). Unlike other communities, we have no counselors living within our community. We are not visited weekly. Nor monthly. Nor quarterly. We are scheduled to have a counselor visit one time to two times per year- PLUS the last two visits have been canceled due to weather and “staffing shortage” or, in a word, no one could be persuaded to come out from the main service hubs. With this last death of the local teenaged boy, there was not even a condolence greeting card.
THIS is beyond being merely “under-resourced.” This is the reason that Goodnews Bay is now seeking our own services. We have the highest needs and the most severe lack of counseling resources of anyplace in the United States. No one can drive here, and all transportation is by chartered air flights.
Our request is for capacity building. Our tribal government needs to create a counseling program to (1) prevent more deaths from young people by providing counseling in the schools, (2) to establish a counseling presence within the community, (3) as stability is achieved, to take these messages to the other small communities in a 50-mile radius of our village (Platinum, Quinhagak, Togiak, and Twin Hills) through periodic visits to their schools and community halls, and (4) to, at a minimum, begin distributing Narcan kits and encouraging health providers to explore Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT)- a heavy lift since some of the health clinics are not staffed nor visited by health providers at all, some have Community Health Aides, or are “hybrids” like Goodnews Bay wherein Community Health Practitioners come in every three weeks and Physicians Assistants (PA’s) come in once per quarter.
We ask for assistance in providing opioid responsiveness and prevention to our village and to our subregion.