Chera Kowalski : The critical role librarians play in the opioid crisis

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When you walk into your neighborhood public library, you expect the librarian to help you find your next favorite book or some accurate information on a topic at interest.

You don't probably expect the librarian to come running out from behind the reference desk with Narcan, ready to revive someone overdosing on heroin or fentanyl.

But this is happening at some libraries.

Public libraries have always been about community support with all kinds of services and programs from assisting with job seeking efforts to locating resources for voter rights to providing free meals to kids and teens even.

But what we think of as community support takes on new urgency when you're in the middle of an opioid and overdose crisis.

I work at the McPherson Square Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

It's located in Kensington, one of the lowest income communities in Philadelphia, with a long history of being isolated from resources and opportunity.

And because of that, it has been the center to the city's drug trade and drug use for decades.

And so inside the neighborhood, our library is nestled inside of a park, which has unfortunately garnered a reputation for being a place to find and use drugs, especially heroin, out in the open, putting us and the community in direct contact with the drug trade and use on a daily basis.

And so inside the library, it is routine to see people visibly intoxicated on opioids: eyes closing, body swaying slowly.

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