Aug 17 at 1:19 PM
Everything by the politicians is treatment, treatment, treatment in the media today. It been like that for years. The heroin addiction problem is very expensive for the town's police, the courts and jails. It is debilitating to town and city budget across the state. There is now an enormous wait to get into treatment. The more the politicians are talking their solution to the heroin problem is treatment, the longer the waiting time is to get into treatment. NH is one of the worst states in the nation with taking care of the mentally ill. It is basically warehousing addicts as a way to save money.
I think this is basically a ploy by all the politicians to talk up “I am fixing the heroin problem by treatment treatment up the ying yang to gain votes. But behind the scene, the ideological politicians don’t want to jack up funding for high quality treatment to get ahead of the ball because they hate everything government. It’s all political penny ante talky, talky bs, with no intention to raise the budgets to deal with the problem. There are now a lot of fly-by-night heroin and addiction treatment center operators who are just out to make big bucks in a crisis. They have no real skills and education to deal with this intractable problem.
What a joke for addicts, 28 day treatment...
Mayor-appointed drug solutions committee releases final report before dissolving
Posted: Saturday, September 3, 2016 8:00 am
By Xander Landen Sentinel Staff SentinelSource.com
Keene does not have enough treatment facilities and licensed alcohol and drug counselors to meet demand from addicts seeking help, according to a new report by Keene’s ad-hoc Committee on Drug Addiction Solutions.
In a separate action earlier that afternoon, Fire Chief Mark F. Howard offered another sobering glimpse of the crisis. In August, two more people in the city died of opioid overdoses, according to the latest data Howard releases each month.
Presenting the report at Thursday's meeting was the committee’s last task after spending a year investigating the impact of the opioid epidemic in Keene and identifying gaps in local resources for preventing and treating addiction.
Mayor Kendall W. Lane appointed the committee — comprised of local law enforcement officers, doctors, substance abuse counselors and public officials — after the City Council voted for him to do so in the spring of 2014.
Keene Police Chief Brian Costa, a committee member, said the committee's dissolution doesn't mean members think their work is done.
Costa said ad-hoc committees last only one year, but both the members and the community at large won't be any less dedicated to fighting the crisis.
“There’s an absolute need — not interest — in continuing this work. ... I think I guaranteed (the City Council) that this work would continue whether or not this committee was in existence,” Costa told The Sentinel.
Committee members stressed during their presentation that Keene offers limited treatment options for people struggling with substance abuse disorders.
According to the committee’s report, medical detoxification, medication-assisted treatment, 28-day
28 day treatment is basically criminal behavior by the system for Heroin addiction. We are talking upwards of a year and a half to two years of intensive . And Axander doesn't even ask of the proper question of how long should the treatment be.
residential treatment programs and residential treatment programs longer than four weeks are all services that are “very limited or not available” in Keene.
The report didn't specify which types of treatment are completely unavailable in the city or to what extent other treatment options are limited.
Committee member Dr. Jose Montero, vice president of population health and health system integration at Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene, said more needs to be done to expand services for drug addicts.
“We know that we do not have enough places where people with these chronic conditions, these drug disorders, can go to be diagnosed, to be treated,” said Montero, who was formerly public health director for the N.H. Department of Health and Human Services.
And data on overdose deaths in Keene support the argument.
Between 2000 and 2011, there were 21 fatal drug overdoses in Keene, according to Costa.
The latest statistics from Howard show that five people have died so far this year from opioid overdoses. Two were in the past three weeks, Costa said.
Last month also saw a slight uptick in the number of recorded overdoses for which Keene firefighters used the opioid antagonist drug Narcan.
In August, the Keene Fire Department administered Narcan to 10 people in likely opioid overdoses. This tally is higher than the average so far for 2016 of about seven patients per month.
Part of what limits access to treatment in Keene is a small workforce trained and licensed to treat drug addicts, according to Montero.
There are only 15 licensed alcohol and drug counselors practicing throughout the city, according to the report.
Worsening the strain is Medicaid expansion and expanded reimbursement under commercial health insurance, which have encouraged an increase in demand for addiction and recovery services, the report says.
Treatment options in Keene “have not grown at nearly the same pace” as that demand, according to the report.
Another challenge to expanding treatment options and services in the city is there are no hard statistics for how many people in Keene need treatment, Montero said.
“We don’t know how many patients are waiting in a long-term framework so we can ... plan for what type of expansions those services need,” he said.
The committee has heard anecdotal information about people waiting between two and eight weeks to get a bed in local treatment facilities, but members don’t know the total number of people waiting to get into services like residential treatment, Montero said.
Keene should create a centralized service where drug addicts can go to be treated for the variety of issues they face, according to Montero; aside from their addictions, he noted, addicts often face a variety of physical and mental health problems.
“We need to figure out a better system to provide care for all of those different situations, hopefully in one place,” he said.
While the report pointed out gaps in Keene's resources to tackle the opioid crisis, it also acknowledged effective efforts the city and community organizations have made in recent years.
It mentioned how Narcan is more accessible to law enforcement agencies and community health centers than ever before, how there is a push for more recovery-coach training and how a Heroin Anonymous group launched in June.
Costa also lauded work Keene is already doing to help streamline treatment for those who want get into recovery.
He spoke about the Cheshire County Addiction Assistance and Recovery Initiative (ChAARI) which launched in May as part of Southwestern Community Services’ Coordinated Access Point Program (CAPP). The program is an 18-month pilot, focused on providing support to addicts who want to start their recovery.
ChAARI established a 24/7 hotline number that first responders can call to get a trained recovery coach dispatched to the emergency room at Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene to help people begin addiction treatment.
ChAARI has received substantial financial support from the community, which shows how dedicated Keene is to fighting the opioid crisis, according to Costa.
"The end result for the police department, like everybody else, is to get people off this stuff," he said, "so that crimes come down and families come back home."
Xander Landen can be reached at 352-1234 ext. 1420 or at xlanden@keenesentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter @XLandenKS
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