State leaders are exploring new ways to expand access to harm reduction.

Those are strategies like safe and managed use of drugs to meet people where they're at while also helping them to get treatment.

Today, the Health Department shared how it's using opioid settlement money to fund new centers and services while reaching into more communities to let residents know the programs exist.

Senior correspondent Joanna Gagis reports.

So many of our systems are only built to serve people who have decided that the day they walk into your treatment facility is the last day that they're going to test.

Positive for drugs.

Health care experts and advocates spoke at the first annual Harm Reduction conference in Newark today about the growing movement toward utilizing harm reduction services to combat overdose deaths in New Jersey.

What we know is that as harm reduction, as everyone is motivated for something, we need to find out what that that motivation is.

Do they want services and support?

Do they want to be part of a community?

The conference was put on by CAIR, a regional training center that's partnered with New Jersey's Department of Health, to expand its trauma informed care.

Dodge Commissioner Dr. Caitlin Bastien spoke about the recent steps the Murphy administration has taken to expand harm reduction services across the state.

We have more than doubled the number of harm reduction approved sites in this state in the last year.

We have now expanded decriminalization of supplies.

That means safer smoking supplies.

That means other supplies that help people not get infections and not get sick.

This means that we can do drug checking, that we can make sure we're meeting people where they are and bringing them in for the kind of support and care that they need.

The state is making a $24 million investment into harm reduction over the next two years.

That's a significant increase from the previous $4 million budget.

Those dollars are coming from the first tranche of the opioid settlement agreement funds.

With all of these investments and things to celebrate, we sometimes will hear in the news.

Oh, but we're starting to flatten the curve or these numbers are coming down.

That little bit of flattening is mostly white New Jersey residents and that the black and brown communities in our state are unfortunately still on the rise of overdose deaths.

Bastien says a major effort of those state dollars will be in support of programs in black and brown communities to get medication into the hands of those who need it.

This harm reduction care and behavioral health care needs to be integrated into the general medical community as well.

We don't need to hold it out as separate all the time.

We need primary care programs, emergency medicine physicians and emergency departments, hospitals to be doing harm reduction and to be treating people with addiction just like we treat everything else over ends.

OB-GYNs, Yes.

It's actually the number one cause of pregnancy associated death in New Jersey right now.

So OB-GYNs, midwives, family physicians that do obstetrics and prenatal care.

But some panelists spoke about how far away we actually are from that goal because of stigma that still exists in health care settings.

We put up very unnatural barriers to the treatment of substance use disorders.

So we have all of these regulations around who can prescribe methadone for opioid use disorder.

Whereas at the same time, if we're going to use methadone for cancer related pain or other pain management, none of those barriers.

Exist to those not in support of harm reduction spaces.

Just look at the impact of one in New York Called On Point, says its executive director, Sam Rivera.

In two and a half years, 100 over 150,000 utilizations, that means 160,000 times people would have used in just two neighborhoods they use indoors with us.

2.5 million units of hazardous waste was was disposed of safely, not in a community, not in parks and in streets, etc.. And the biggest thing I would say to those who oppose is we agree with you.

We don't want all these things to happen either.

I think the biggest difference is we also want to keep our people alive and have that community impact and impact.

Advocates want to see more of in New Jersey in the coming years.

In Newark, I'm Joanna Gaddis, NJ.

Spotlight News.