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Luzerne County Councilman Harry Haas said River Common looking better

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Friends of the Osterhout Library plan 43rd annual book sale

Earlier this month, I was at Pocono Raceway with thousands of fellow NASCAR fans, watching Kyle Busch win the Pocono 400 and master the Tricky Triangle. As exciting as the race was, I was there for another purpose: partnering with Pocono Raceway on our Office of Attorney General&#8217;s prescription drug takeback program.All weekend, my staff talked with race-goers about the opioid epidemic ravaging Pennsylvania, and collected their unused prescription drugs. Thanks to Pocono Raceway, our presence was advertised on social media and track TV screens. My team collected 78 pounds of prescription drugs for disposal &#8211; far more than we collected in our first year of this partnership. We also distributed 1,400 drug deactivation pouches.Our success at the track highlights something my office works hard at every day: the power of partnerships to solve problems and better protect Pennsylvanians&#8217; health, safety and welfare.Whether it&#8217;s taking on the opioid epidemic, protecting senior citizens from gift-card scams, safeguarding school children, or cracking down on gun violence, I learned early on that as talented as my office is, we can&#8217;t tackle these big problems alone. We need partners to better protect our citizens, and we&#8217;re finding them &#8211; all across Pennsylvania.In western Pennsylvania, we&#8217;re partnering with the Pittsburgh Penguins, Rite-Aid and EVERFI on a prescription drug safety education program that&#8217;s trained 11,700 students in more than 100 Pennsylvania high schools on the dangers of prescription drug and opioid abuse. It&#8217;s working well, and it&#8217;s now expanded to the central part of the state.When our Bureau of Consumer Protection began hearing about grifters and scam artists enticing seniors to buy gift cards in department stores and send the card information to scammers &#8211; in the mistaken belief they were helping family members &#8211; we partnered with Walmart, Target and Best Buy to make changes. The retail chains reduced the number of cards, set lower dollar limits, increased employee training, and took other steps in cooperation with my office to protect seniors from these scams. The New York Attorney General&#8217;s Office partnered with us as well, and we&#8217;re continuing to work with other retailers on this initiative.When the issue is protecting school children, our Safe2Say Something Anonymous Reporting system is truly a collaborative endeavor. The Pennsylvania legislature conceived the program &#8211; an anonymous tips line that includes a website and online app &#8211; directed my office to run it, and appropriated funding. Working with school leaders across Pennsylvania, the Safe2Say program has trained more than 832,000 students in 1,002 schools on signs to look for in students at-risk. We&#8217;re also partnering with the Sandy Hook Foundation, a tremendous organization formed after the school-shooting tragedy, on the use of the app and trainings. In five months, Safe2Say staff have received more than 24,000 hotline tips and referred more than 4,000 of those tips to local school officials and 911 call centers for follow-up. These collaborations help make our schools safer.In Philadelphia, our Attorney General&#8217;s Gun Violence Task Force partners with local police and the city&#8217;s district attorney to target illegal gun trafficking. Thanks to cooperation with those partners and federal law enforcement assistance, our Task Force executed a major operation several months ago that took gun criminals off the streets, confiscated illegal guns and as importantly, brought a measure of peace to a Philadelphia neighborhood. The power of partnerships to help Pennsylvanians includes government agencies collaborating, too.Sometimes, our partnerships are on a more localized level, like the nonprofit group, Hunts for Healing, that helps military veterans struggling with PTSD by exposing them to hunting and outdoor activities. My office donated $64,400 &#8211; monies left over from a court case &#8212; to Hunts for Healing in Wyoming County to help more veterans.My point isn&#8217;t to just praise the Attorney General&#8217;s office, although I&#8217;m grateful every day for the incredibly hard-working public servants who work for our agency. It is to highlight the very real power of partnerships &#8211; with corporations, nonprofit organizations, law enforcement partners, citizen advocates, and government officials who believe, as I do, that united there is little we cannot do to improve Pennsylvanians&#8217; lives. I&#8217;ll keep working with these kinds of partners all across our Commonwealth.<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta>Josh ShapiroGuest Columnist</bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta>Josh Shapiro is the attorney general of Pennsylvania.</shirttailMeta></div>

Their view: The power of partnerships to help Pennsylvanians