By raise of hands, Greene County Commissioner Blair Zimmerman wanted to know, how many people in the room thought the opioid epidemic could be cured?

Zimmerman posed this question more than a month ago, at the last meeting of the county’s overdose task force, a room full of more than 100 law enforcement, healthcare and education professionals.

No one raised their hands.

Zimmerman still thinks about the room’s reaction, knowing that for all the work the group is doing, there will always be more.

“It’s not an overnight thing,” he said.

Compounding on Zimmerman’s sentiment, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently released new provisional data recording drug overdose deaths in every state for the last three and a half years. In Pennsylvania, the number of deaths has steadily climbed since 2015.

The data, which provides information up to August 2018, ends with Pennsylvania recording 4,572 deaths by drug overdose that month. This is compared to 3,075 in August 2015, and even fewer at the start of that year.

At first glance, the state-level data seems to contrast Greene County’s most recent statistics, which show reduced overdose deaths in the county in 2018—dropping from 17 in 2017 to just eight in 2018.

Greene County has been aggressively addressing the national opioid crisis through the Overdose Task Force, established in 2017, which Zimmerman said is constantly working on programs to educate community members on the dangers of drug use.

“What knowledge we have, we’re implementing all the time,” he said.

The task force employs professionals from healthcare, law enforcement and education to research and implement preventative measures toward drug use, said Jeff Marshall, chief clerk. Some examples include resource lists for recovering addicts and drug take-back locations, for people to safely dispose of their perspription opioids.

Whether or not the task force can be credited with a decrease in overdose deaths remains to be seen, however. Gene Rush, Greene County’s coroner and a member of the task force, said four deaths by overdose have already occurred in the county this year—half of 2018’s final tally in just three months.

With this in mind, Rush said it’s impossible to determine if last year’s apparent decline in deaths will be maintained for another year; and there’s nothing in the state-level data to suggest it either.

“The state, in general, has not had a dramatic decrease,” he said.

Rush also said last year’s supposed decrease in Greene County could have been caused by a variety of factors, such as drug users overdosing in other nearby counties or in West Virginia. That could have thrown off the statistics, he said.

With all this uncertainty, both Rush and Zimmerman said county officials are doing the best that they can to remedy a problem that will likely never go away.

“The federal government and state governments spent billions of dollars on this problem, on what’s going on nationwide,” Zimmerman said. “And everybody’s in the same boat.”

Still, Zimmerman believes everything the task force is doing, from creating more educational opportunities to communicating with the public, is important. The best we can do, he said, is to make it better.

“Everybody’s attacking the problem as best they can, and using all the resources they can use,” he said.

Though progress is elusive, for now, Zimmerman said there isn’t a day that goes by in his job without addressing the opioid crisis in some capacity.

“Until it’s done—and it will never be done—we will always address drug and alcohol issues,” Zimmerman said. “My heart is vested in this.”