"Throwing them in jail does not work, all it does is kick the can down the road," says Hardin County Sheriff Keith Everhart.
Law students at Ohio Northern University sat in on a panel discussion that focused on legal issues regarding the opioid crisis. The panel put on by the school's Federalist Society chose to bring in professionals to talk about the opioid epidemic because it's a problem that can reach anyone, anywhere.
"Opioids has a lot of effect on a lot of different people and in a lot of different professions," says John Willamowski, secretary for the Federalist Society. It's most important now as we go through the crisis that we as future legal professionals are up to date on what we need to know."
Sitting on the panel were Hardin County Prosecutor Bradford Bailey and Sheriff Everhart, who both spoke on how the epidemic has affected their jobs, focusing on the county's statistics and what is being done locally to address the issue.
State Representative Robert Sprague (83rd District), who sits on the Subcommittee on Health and Human Services, spoke on what Ohio is doing as a state to tackle the issue. He says it is important that law students understand that it is a complex issue that affects all aspects of the justice system.
"It is affecting the legal community, criminal justice is under a tremendous strain because of the influx of these narcotics from Mexico," says Sprague. "The high-powered fentanyl and carfentanil that's killing people in the state of Ohio, so it's a tremendous concern and it's increasingly putting pressure on our local social infrastructure."
Sprague says he hopes students walked away from the panel understanding that if Ohio can be ground zero for the epidemic, then it can also be ground zero for the treatment.
