York County District Attorney Dave Sunday, candidate for attorney general, answers questions at a candidates forum in Pittsburgh Oct. 23, 2024 (Photo by Abigail Hakas for the Capital-Star)
York County District Attorney Dave Sunday said Monday that his work to stem the opioid overdose epidemic as a prosecutor a decade ago changed his life.
Speaking to an audience at the Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon in Harrisburg, Sunday said that while working on the effort that became the York County Opioid Collective, he attended hundreds of meetings and met with people directly impacted by the opioid epidemic before it made many headlines.
“We sat in living rooms with parents who’ve lost their children, and we did everything in between, really, to understand what was going on,” Sunday said.
It became clear that not only was there an epidemic of addiction killing people, but there was a severe mental health crisis in Pennsylvania, Sunday said. And a majority of crime in Pennsylvania, he said, was related directly or tangentially to addiction, mental illness or a combination of the two.