Working together to fight the opioid and heroin epidemic is the top priority of the state attorney general’s office.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro met with Carbon County officials Thursday morning in Lehighton for a roundtable discussion on the heroin and opioid outbreak.

“The drug trade, the drug dealers don’t follow the municipal boundaries,” Shapiro said. “They don’t care if they’re in Lehighton or Jim Thorpe or wherever, they just, they sell this poison in our communities.”

Shapiro said they shut down two heroin pipelines that actually started in New York City, went through northeastern Pennsylvania into toward southwestern Pennsylvania, and ended up in Altoona and Johnstown, and dumped combined a million-and-a-half bags of heroin into Pennsylvania, all from New York City.

“So they’re going wherever they can,” he said. “That’s why we’ve stepped up our efforts to work with neighboring attorneys general, with the feds, with others.”

Shapiro added, “But it is really important that we can’t look at this just as individual counties or boroughs; this is a statewide problem, that’s why we all got to work together, why these task forces are critically important.”

Shapiro was also scheduled to meet with Monroe, Pike and Wayne county officials throughout the day.

Read the full story in tomorrow’s edition of the Times News.