This March will be the fourth anniversary of the death of Mark Grunlund’s son, Sam. He died from a fentanyl and cocaine overdose in 2020.

Grunlund remembered his son as a good athlete — a baseball pitcher in his youth before he started using drugs.

The young Staten Island native was 27 when he died in Florida.

"There’s not a day that goes by that I don't miss him," Grunlund said.

Grunlund belongs to a support group, where he learned that the Staten Island district attorney, Michael McMahon, had an opioid overdose task force.

"They were looking for volunteers and I jumped at the chance to put in my two cents' worth," Grunlund said.

On Wednesday, Grunlund was in McMahon’s office, along with other members of the task force, when the group issued their recommendations to stop overdose deaths from opioids and fentanyl.

"It’s going to be more than harm reduction. We can’t prosecute our way out of it. We need education, prevention. All of those elements come together and they can have an improvement," McMahon said.

The recommendations include:

• More coordination with law enforcement agencies around the region
• Allowing more felony drug offenses to be eligible for bail
• More funding for education and early prevention programs
• Giving people addicted to drugs priority for housing programs
• More access to community overdose prevention and harm reduction services
  

The task force declined to take a position on safe injection sites.

There were 155 suspected fatal overdoses on Staten Island last year. That’s more than triple the 51 of people who died of suspected overdoses in 2009.

"We've often get reports around clients who have died from fentanyl overdoses. We've had people overdose in our bathrooms," said Diane Arneth, the executive director of Community Health Action of Staten Island. "If we don't work diligently and effectively with people who are continuing to use drugs in ways that help them reduce the harms of those drugs, we're going to continue to see very high rates of overdose."

Grunlund brought a different perspective.

"I advocate for stronger penalties," Grunland said.

For fentanyl and xylazine, Grunland does not think they should not be classified as Class A drugs.

"They should be classified as something worse. They're poison," Grunland said.

The top recommendation from the task force is having New York state declare an opioid public health emergency, something advocates have pressed Gov. Kathy Hochul to do.

The task force says such a declaration can allow the state to take immediate actions, like faster deployment of opioid settlement funds and waiving insurance costs for New Yorkers trying to access addiction treatment.

Hochul has publicly discussed her family tragedy — her nephew died from an overdose. She outlined in her State of the State address new proposals, like updating New York's list of controlled substances to include fentanyl analogs, xylazine and other prescription medications.

While her spokesperson, Avi Small, did not comment on calls for an opioid public health emergency, he said that the governor "will continue making smart, responsible investments to address the extraordinary scale of this crisis and deliver support to those who need it."