For the past two years Street Roots has covered what some are calling an opiate/heroin epidemic in the region. SR is in no place to determine if the region is dealing with what we can call an epidemic — but it’s not pretty.
Last week, as reported by SR, the State of Oregon Alcohol and Drug Policy Commission gave an overview of Oregon’s drug treatment system. The report calls for a complete overhaul of the system, which is “fragmented” with “significant gaps in coverage.”
Dr. Dennis McCarty, a member of the commission, told SR that Oregon’s treatment system continues to reflect what the need was 20 or 30 years ago, when treatment programs were developed to serve a population of “public inebriates.” Now, he says, there is growing demand to provide treatment for women, youth, and other groups who are addicted to drugs other than alcohol, such as heroin. “This is about catching up to the year 2010,” he says.
Yes, finally someone who is thinking in the 21st century. Wait, maybe not.
Street Roots has highlighted alternatives in Vancouver, B.C. and in Europe over the past year that use harm reduction models through injection sites where heroin addicts can medicate in a safe environment. The programs have onsite medical professionals, drug counselors and housing specialists to work with individuals dealing with addiction. In 2009, the Vancouver program channeled more than 6,000 addicts to health and addiction services, as well as more than 400 enrolled at the on-site detox center.
Unfortunately, advocates, providers, electives and government officials don’t want to talk injection sites, and instead offer nothing other than more money for more treatment for more of the same. Seriously?
Gary Oxman, with the Multnomah County Public Health department, says that when considering implementing new programs, public health officials need to ask “Can you implement it in this country in a practical sense?” and “does our legal framework allow you to do it?” He says that there are political concerns as well, and it would not be practical to create a program that would be unpopular or dismantled after an election cycle.
Valid points, but none of them include anything to do with addicts themselves or even health care. The statements are about navigating bad policies through a failed war on drugs, curtailing controversy for social service programs already feeling the heat, and how we would manage public perception. (And we’re not even going into decriminalization, or the fact that 90 percent of the world’s opiates come from Afghanistan, a country we happen to be fighting in, or that the U.S. has the highest rate in the world of drug-related prisoners serving hard time, or that most of the heroin in Oregon is being brought to the region by drug cartels.)
In Portland, millions of dollars are spent on treatment programs and methadone clinics. The city through the Service Coordination Team spends $2 million a year alone to target addicts through law enforcement to get clean or go to jail.
In 2009, 127 people died of heroin overdoses in Oregon. In 2008, 131 died of methadone overdoses. In the past five years, prescription opiate overdoses has risen 500 percent in Oregon with nearly 4,000 hospitalizations from overdoses.
Is this really how we catch up to 2010, or are we redefining the Dark Ages? Because more of the same services focused on a different demographic isn’t looking foward at all. And that leaves us falling behind.