>> I'm Jane McCauley, reporting from Madison.

>> In health news, good news, the centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports a more than 10% decline in drug deaths this year for the first time after decades of steep increases.

Wisconsin mirrors the downward trend.

There certainly has been an all out push to save lives from law enforcement interdiction efforts to harm reduction efforts like Narcan on the ground locally, the Medical College of Wisconsin also helps communities conduct overdose fatality reviews to look holistically at the victims, to help others stay alive until they can get treatment.

La Crosse County has been conducting such reviews since 2018.

Pelosi love is from the county health department.

She joins us now.

And Paula, thanks a lot for being here.

>> Thank you so much.

It's an honor to have this discussion.

>> So he's a la Crosse County.

Also seen a reduction in overdose deaths has as has been the case nationally and statewide.

>> Well, our rate in 2023 was the highest that it's ever been.

So, you know that was end of 2023.

When we're looking at 2024 we're behind the numbers that we saw last year at this time.

So we're hopeful that the total numbers will be less than, you know, 2023.

But we don't know that yet.

We've still got a few months of 24 to get through.

>> When you're conducting an overdose fatality review, what are you looking at in that person's life?

>> We're looking at early substance use.

We're also looking at trauma that they may have experienced.

You know, were they a party to a home where other substance use was going on?

Did they have particularly difficult schooling?

Did they move a lot?

You know, did were they a part of a broken family, that people may have heard of the term ACS, which is adverse childhood experiences.

And we know that those there's, there's like ten different experiences and we know those experiences make children's lives that much more difficult.

So we look for that.

We aren't calling them aces, but we look at the growing up history of the person.

If we have access to that, we also look at how much they moved.

There might have been medical problems that people have had.

We've had several people who have had head injuries, and we know that that's a concussion.

We know that that also impacts thinking and coping abilities that young people have.

And then we look at involvement with, with treatment, law enforcement, if they've been incarcerated at all.

We're looking at all of those kinds of things, to look at opportunities where, prevention couldn't be walking down that same path in the future.

>> Give us a sense of who makes up the team.

>> So the team is a combination of there's probably 12 to 15, professionals and community group.

So law enforcement, we have someone from the judicial system.

We have some treatment, people who are involved in treatment.

When we have people from a, a school setting, whether it's K-12 or post-secondary education, we educational setting as well, we have have, a pharmacist who we can consult with whenever we need to.

Our medical examiner and then fire department staff, who are often the first responders or respond when, an overdose.

911 call is called in within the city of la Crosse.

>> So you spoke to some kinds of changes that have been effected coming out of these reviews.

What's an example of one of those tangible changes?

>> One of the changes is a jail release kit that's provided to all people who have been discharged from the county jail.

We were noticing in doing and conducting reviews that within the first couple of months after getting out of jail, if the individual returned to their former lifestyle, they were at a great risk of overdose.

And so a jail release kit was something that was a was put together by some of the groups that or agencies that are represented on the team.

And so it includes Narcan.

It includes, a rescue mask.

So for providing rescue breathing, that's one example, another example is, acknowledging that we might have a particularly, particularly, contaminated, supply of drugs in our community because the thought now is that there's no pure substance, even substances like meth, are often laced with fentanyl or xylazine in the community.

describes reducing the stigma of drug addiction as an important prong.

Why >> I think it's important to talk about it in the community and not have people look down on folks who are using substances.

And in order to do that, we need to talk about it openly in the community, people sometimes have bad feelings about harm reduction.

Well, why would you prevent people from overdosing?

Because it's about saving their lives until they're ready to take that next step towards treatment.

I also think that we need to acknowledge that many people, not all, but many people who are, attracted to substance use are attracted because they're struggling with some other condition, something else that has a lot of stigma in our community and probably state and nationwide is mental health.

I also think that we need to talk about, people who overdose in our community aren't just unsheltered people.

They are people who have jobs, who have homes, might have college educations.

They just are caught in that cycle.

That addictive cycle of substance use and that drive, that addiction is really, really strong.

And so they might want to quit.

But it's one more, one more experience with a substance.

And that might be the experience that has the fentanyl in it.

That then is leads to them having an unintentional overdose.

overdose.