The City of Providence will invest $870,000 in overdose prevention as part of the City’s ongoing Overdose Prevention Strategy, Mayor Brett Smiley announced earlier this month.
Over two-thirds of this funding will be allocated to local nonprofits through five new grant opportunities, according to the City press release. Of the remaining investments, over $250,000 will go towards the country’s first state-authorized overdose prevention center, which is set to open in Providence by the end of this year.
The announcement comes in the midst of a national opioid epidemic, which spiked in Rhode Island at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighted Brandon Marshall, professor of epidemiology and the founding director of Brown’s People, Place and Health Collective, in an interview with The Herald.
Data from PreventOverdoseRI shows a drastic increase in Rhode Island’s overdose-related deaths between 2020 and 2021, with numbers hovering around 430 deaths per year going into 2022. But in 2023, overdose deaths decreased by approximately 7% to 404 confirmed deaths — a shift Marshall hopes is the payoff of overdose prevention programs and increased access to Naloxone, an overdose reversal medication.
In the state, Providence is one of the most overdose-impacted communities, Marshall said. The city saw over 100 overdose deaths in 2023, one of the highest per-capita rates in Rhode Island.
Beyond focusing on Providence, solutions also need to address racial inequity in overdose deaths, Marshall said.
“We know that Black African-American Rhode Islanders are most heavily impacted by the crisis and continue to be,” he said. “So although a decrease overall is encouraging, we need to focus on addressing some of these significant inequities in overdose deaths.”
Ensuring ‘comprehensive’ and ‘evidence-based’ solutions
The five grant opportunities are drawn out of settlement funds from the 2021 National Opioids class action lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies.
According to Emily Freedman, Providence’s director of housing and human services, the grants’ creation was informed by current overdose data as well as community input.
“The City sought to enhance the impact of current harm reduction investments with programs that address substance use initiation, increase treatment complementation and support those entering and maintaining recovery,” Freedman wrote in an email to The Herald.
Grant applicants are required to utilize culturally competent approaches to ensure their proposals address communities disproportionately affected by the overdose crisis, Freedman added.
Stacey Levin, the director of recovery housing at Rhode Island Communities for Addiction Recovery Efforts, said that she hopes the grants will fund an addiction-conscious low barrier housing program.
Levin also stressed the importance of systemic changes to reduce substance use among children — highlighting the need to establish stable home environments by tackling food and housing insecurity instead of using resources on drug abstinence education programs.
“We need to make sure that families have what they need to provide for their children,” Levin said.
A first for the nation: Providence’s Overdose Prevention Center
The quarter of a million dollars allocated to the City’s Overdose Prevention Center will be used by Project Weber/RENEW — Rhode Island's largest center for harm reduction and recovery services — to launch the prevention center later this year.
According to OPC Manager Claire Macon, the center’s first floor will serve as a drop-in location providing access to food, laundry, showers, case management, support groups and HIV testing. Weber/RENEW, which has been operating in Providence since 2008, runs three other drop-in centers — two in Providence and one in Pawtucket.
The second floor will house the OPC, which will allow community members to administer their own drugs under the supervision of “judgment-free, stigma-free and respectful” staff who can intervene in the case of an overdose or other side effects, Macon said.
“A lot of our staff are people with lived experience, whether it be substance use, people who have engaged in sex work, people with HIV or people who have been incarcerated,” Macon added. “The reality of a peer-led organization is that it gives us the capacity to build trust a lot faster.”
The center specifically aims to combat the increased overdose risks caused by the presence of other chemicals in the drug supply, such as fentanyl and xylazine, Macon explained.
“We have an incredibly toxic drug supply, and it’s not a street-level dealer issue,” Levin said. “The drug supply is killing people, not substance use,” she added.
Macon emphasized that there is no “one size fits all solution” to the overdose crisis, highlighting the disproportionate effects of the crisis on Black and brown communities. To achieve this, organizations should consider the unique geography, demographics, drug supply and policing of various communities.
So far, Macon says the community response to the center has been very positive.
“I think it’s the smartest move Rhode Island has ever made,” Levin said.
