CRANBERRY TWP — Democrats Honora Rockar and Daniel Smith Jr., who are hoping to challenge state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe in November, presented their positions on opioid addiction and abortion during a candidates forum.

The event Saturday at the Cranberry Township Municipal Center was open to constituents of the 12th District, which covers Cranberry, Adams, Forward, Penn, Clinton and Middlesex townships.

Smith, an Adams resident, has spent the last 14 years at Bank of New York Mellon where he is a senior supervisor.

Rockar teaches business information systems as an adjunct professor in the Palumbo-Donahue School of Business at Duquesne University and has lived in Cranberry since 2004.

The candidates disagreed on who was to blame for the opioid epidemic, with Rockar criticizing the pharmaceutical companies and Smith targeting doctors.

“They should have known how addictive those drugs are,” Rockar said. “I think they should be held accountable, and they should be encouraged to provide the support they need to move people off opioids.”

Smith drew from personal experience with drug prescribers.

“I was one of those people,” Smith said. “I go to my own doctor, and I had panic attacks, and he ended up prescribing me right away a medication called Klonopin.”

The maximum dose for Klonopin, a sedative, is 0.25 milligrams a day, Smith said. His doctor prescribed him 2 milligrams.

Smith stayed on that prescription for four years until he got a second opinion and learned he was taking too much.

“They said, 'No, you're pretty much killing yourself,'” he said.

It took him a year to wean himself down to an acceptable dosage.

“I hold the doctors accountable because there's only 20 minutes in and out (in the) process they have. They don't truly understand what's happening,” he said. “The prescription companies are doing their jobs. The doctors are the ones that handle it.”

Both also differed on a recently-proposed abortion bill banning the procedure after 24 weeks.

Smith disagreed with abortion bans, he said, while Rockar emphasized the need for holding fathers responsible and providing societal support for mothers.

“I was fortunate enough to have two live children and I was unfortunate to have two miscarriages in between,” she said. “And so I know the mental effects of losing a child. And so I'm personally against abortion, but then I'd like to extend the thought process out.''

Rockar emphasized the lack of accountability on men in society today despite the fact that they are equally responsible for creating the child, saying that she'd like to see society better support pregnant women.

“I want to look at society and see where those problems are, where you bring in the responsibility of the other person as well,” she said. “And look to see what changes need to be made in terms of society and support in order to decrease the need for that type of medical change.”

Smith said he supports the women's right to choose, drawing on personal experience with a friend whose life was in danger due to complications in her pregnancy.

“There's unforeseen circumstances that happen and happened with a good friend of mine,” he said. “A friend of mine was faced with close to 24 weeks where the baby had a birth defect that it wasn't going to be able to live not even a day. But the problem with it was she would have died too. They made that difficult decision, and they feel bad everyday when they visit his grave.”

Smith added that he believes it's not his place to legislate this area of a person's life.

“It's no more my place to question what a woman does for her body just in the same way they have no place to tell me how to live my life as a gay individual,” Smith said. “We need to work with women on this. We can't have men doing this all the time.”

At the end of event, Butler County Democrats volunteer and organizer Catherine Lalonde encouraged the crowd to get involved.

“We have a lot to be proud of, but we have a lot more to do,” she said. “I'm asking you to be an active participant in democracy because it doesn't just take care of itself.”