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St. Louis County Executive candidates weigh in on Opioid Crisis

I want to know what, as a county supervisor, you would do to address the opioid issue which is serious in the county?

ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. — Buzz Jelinek lives in Kirkwood. His question: "I want to know what, as a county supervisor, you would do to address the opioid issue which is serious in the county?"

In Steve Stenger's first term, he added Narcan to every St. Louis County Police car.

"We’ve saved well over a hundred lives by putting that in our police vehicles," says Stenger.

Stenger also recreated Missouri's first prescription drug monitoring program. It tracks controlled substances and how often they are prescribed.

"It’s not a silver bullet but it is certainly one very important tool and we were the last state in the union to not have a prescription drug monitoring program. So we took a really innovative approach and created our own program and made it joinable so that other jurisdictions could join our program and now we have 80% of the state’s population covered by our program and over 90% of the state’s providers covered by our program," says Stenger.

Businessman Mark Mantovani applauds the prescription drug monitoring program but believes there's more that can and should be done.

"Monitoring programs have not had the positive impact a lot expected. A UOF study in 2016 showed that the impact is not what was hoped. I think we’re going to have to find additional resources in the long run across the country whether that’s national, state or local in order to provide more treatment and recovery for the people affected," says Mantovani.

Mantovani says, with an epidemic this big, bold actions will have to be taken.

He even floated the idea of implementing safe injection sites.

"We’re going to have to get more aggressive as we deal with this. A lot of this has to come from the federal and state level because so much of this is prescription oriented," says Mantovani.

#MeetUsAtThePodium is a six-part installment that will air on 5 On Your Side at 10, the two weeks leading up to the August 7 Missouri State Primary.

Full interview: St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger

Full interview: St. Louis County Executive candidate Mark Mantovani

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