Old Mystic Fire Chief Kenneth W. Richards Jr. called on fellow fire chiefs from New England at a meeting Thursday in Springfield, Mass., to draft a position statement urging state and federal representatives for a stronger response to the heroin and opioid crisis.
Richards, a member of the executive board of the New England Division of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, said he barely had time to raise the motion before at least three chiefs responded with a second. The vote that followed was unanimous, he said by phone Thursday afternoon.
The draft will be voted on at a meeting in April and forwarded to the governors and state and federal politicians in all six New England states, Richards said. The next step, he said, would be to take their message to the International Association of Fire Chiefs, which he said has a lot of influence in Washington.
"There's a crisis," Richard said. "We can't ignore it. We need to concentrate on getting it off the street, stricter sentencing for dealers, and better and more access for patients to get treatment."