United States Drug Enforcement Administration

Every year, Aliviane, (an addiction recovery center in El Paso) organizes an annual conference to highlight the prevalent issues in the community, and to educate parents on various health and legal consequences of substance use.

“Our annual conference aims at bridging the gaps of knowledge or highlighting prevalent issues in our community,” said Michelle Millen, Data Coordinator for Aliviane. “That’s why we asked DEA to present on the substances we see a high usage of in El Paso County.”

At the April conference, the DEA El Paso Division gave a presentation on fentanyl and the most-recent Safety Bulletin and One Pill Can Kill (OPCK) campaign. One of the attendees was Claudia Janeth Galindo, Aliviane’s Program Director for community coalition partnerships and their prevention resource center. She was especially interested in the DEA posters and the billboard graphics. So she reached out to the DEA El Paso Division to get clarification if they could use them at Aliviane.

“I told the DEA that during the month of April, Aliviane was doing an awareness campaign ‘Dispose, Do not Overdose’ with different billboards around the community,” Galindo said. “I was wondering if we could support the One Pill Can Kill campaign, after all, we have the same outreach goals, which is reduce the overdose cases in our community.”

The El Paso Division assisted Aliviane in providing the bilingual billboard and posters digital files to their advertising company, and beginning on May 24, the new OPCK billboards went up throughout El Paso.

“Aliviane is happy to collaborate with this DEA campaign,” Galindo said “These billboards will be in the community until July 10. We also printed out the posters, 300 in English and 150 in Spanish and are now providing them to the community during Aliviane’s presentations to schools and other community partners.”