This Is How America Is Failing Its Young Opioid Generation
Credit to Author: Jack Dodson| Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2019 20:07:54 +0000
Jeremy Beal woke up on the floor of a friend’s house in November 2017. Fifteen minutes earlier, he’d been dying from an overdose. The 25-year-old from Maine had stopped breathing for 12 minutes after overdosing on heroin.
Recalling the evening, Beal said he’d used a small amount of heroin while drinking alcohol. It was enough to cause an overdose, perhaps because he hadn’t been using for a few weeks before that. A friend revived him with two hits of Narcan, the nasal spray that reverses the effects of a drug overdose.
Then the cops came in. Beal was taken to the hospital, checked out, and promptly arrested in his bed for unpaid fines. Within two hours of nearly dying, he was handcuffed and taken to the police station to spend the night in jail.
The episode was one of a long line of unfortunate interactions Beal had with the criminal justice system in Maine during his six years as an opioid user. While trying to deal with his addiction, he was arrested four times, placed in solitary confinement, and caught up in a Maine Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) investigation. He tried to address his addiction, twice seeking assistance from rehabilitation programs.
A series of interviews with Beal and those close to him highlighted the everyday reality for many of America’s almost three million people struggling with prescription and street opioid misuse. Crucially, the evidence suggests Beal’s experiences are not extraordinary, even if his status as a white man with decent access to resources via his family and community may have spared him an even more onerous saga. Which makes the whole thing all the more pernicious: Even after all the media coverage, attempts by law enforcement officials and healthcare professionals to fight the opioid crisis continue to reinforce the very problems they are meant to address.
Beal’s next encounter with law enforcement came at a Motel 8. He’d sold his car and had some money for a hotel room—rather than rent a place, he began living out of there. A woman who dealt heroin and Suboxone began selling from his hotel room. They hung out for a few days, and he bought heroin from her.
One morning, they went down for the hotel’s free breakfast, and she saw her probation officer in the lobby. The officer called out her name, and Beal headed back to the room to grab everything he could before heading to a nearby Burger King, where he tried to flush the drugs down the toilet. But he realized he’d left some in the hotel and, knowing the room was in his name, went back. While he was there, the police knocked on the door.
He ended up getting charged for possession of Suboxone and needles. He spent two more weeks in jail before being bailed out by his mother.
Too often for those addicted to opioids, the revolving doors between petty crime and jail stop revolving when they die from drugs. Beal was one of the lucky ones. Barely.
It was his mother who suggested a faith-based and abstinence recovery program. They found a men’s home in Ellsworth through CityReach, a non-denominational network of Christian churches operating across the US. The Ellsworth branch ran a nine-month recovery program that brought together men dealing with a range of issues: pornography addiction, crack addiction, alcoholism. Many were formerly incarcerated.
Beal gave it a shot, and began working for an electrician. But as often happens with rehab, he relapsed. This is when he nearly died on the floor of his friend’s house before being arrested for unpaid debts at the hospital.
Beal was by no means the only person in a Maine jail that night for unpaid debt: A 2015 report by Maine’s judicial branch found that 25 percent of defendants in seven of Maine’s 16 counties were booked for unpaid fines. The vast majority of these people stayed in jail less than two days.
The next day, Beal’s pastor from CityReach bailed him out. While Beal showed improvement in the wake of this experience—something he credits to the faith-based rehabilitation program—these are the kinds of arrests that can restart the cycle for people dealing with addiction. As Maine’s opioid death toll increased, a complex web of enforcement practices and inefficient treatment resources worked against Beal.
The state’s new Democratic governor, Janet Mills, campaigned on a platform that included a ten-point plan to fight opioid misuse, including increasing the number of drug courts, making Narcan available for anyone, and reducing the number of opioid prescriptions. The plan made no mention of increased resources for law enforcement.
But the platform squared awkwardly with Mills’s background: She was the state’s attorney general from 2009 to 2011, and served in the role again starting in 2013. Prosecutors in her office levied charges against Mainers like Beal for much of that time. In an email last month, Scott Ogden, Mills’s communication director, said the now-governor would prioritize “treatment, prevention and education” of substance abuse over prosecution.
“The governor-elect… plans to increase treatment options by making medication-assisted treatment available and recovery coaches on call at every clinic, every law enforcement agency, and every emergency room in Maine, along with implementing a true hub and spokes treatment model across the state,” Ogden added.
Last year, Beal moved down to southern Maine to work and live with his mother, where he’s going to counseling regularly. When a young man he’d attended the CityReach program with died of an overdose, he was caught off-guard. They weren’t friends, but the guy had reached out to him about a month earlier. Beal ignored it, wanting to avoid people he associated with opioids. Still, he wondered if all this man needed was someone to acknowledge him and his pain—to help deal with it, something the system is so often ill-equipped to do.
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This article originally appeared on VICE US.