Pubdate: Wed, 02 Mar 2016 Source: Ithaca Times (NY) Copyright: Ithaca Times 2016 Contact: http://www.ithacatimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1755 LOCAL ARMISTICE IN DRUG WAR The national media, yea, the international media is abuzz about the proposed legal heroin injection facility that is included in the "Ithaca Plan" released by the Municipal Drug Policy Committee (MDPC) put into motion by Mayor Svante Myrick. The focus is on the "shooting gallery" because, as U.S. law stands now, it would be illegal to set up such a place without the declaration of an emergency by the governor or the President. Isn't it just like the national and international media to make a big deal about something that has so much prurient interest and yet is really just a small part of a much broader, more ambitious, more practical campaign? Perhaps by emphasizing the least possible element of the plan, they hope to send the whole thing into the weeds? Why do that? The Ithaca Plan does something mighty: it calls off the War on Drugs. President Richard Nixon coined the term in a June 1971 press conference and 44 years later we are still fighting and losing this ridiculous "war." The text of the plan acknowledges this historical context on its opening page: "There is a growing acknowledgement among policymakers that the war on drugs-the dominant drug policy framework for the past four and a half decades-has failed and new approaches are needed." Myrick didn't invent this out of whole cloth, but he is getting on board a progressive movement to change the approach to dealing with our perennial drug problem. Drugs have always been ubiquitous and for centuries were largely unregulated. One of the first comprehensive pieces of legislation, Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, continued to allow cocaine, heroin, cannabis, and other such drugs to be legally available without prescription as long as they were labeled. We have long struggled with whether to consider drug use and addiction a public health problem or a crime. In August 1969 psychiatrist Robert DuPont urine-tested everyone entering the jails of Washington, D.C. He found that 44 percent of them tested positive for heroin. A month later he started the first public methadone treatment program. The official perspective on drug use as had multiple-personality disorder since. The organizing principle of the Ithaca Plan has four "pillars": prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and law enforcement. The MDPC, inaugurated in September 2014, includes law enforcement officials-district attorney Gwen Wilkinson, police chief John Barber, judge Judy Rossiter-but it also listed among its members the leaders of local non-profits who deal with populations impacted by illegal drug use: Lillian Fan of Southern Tier AIDS Program (STAP), Liz Vance of the Ithaca Youth Bureau, Angela Sullivan of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counsel, Marcia Fort, Travis Brooks and Leslyn McBean-Clairborne of GIAC, Judy Hoffman of the Ithaca City School District, among others. Bill Rusen of Cayuga Addiction Recovery Services (CARS) was the original chair of the MDPC; Wilkinson and Fan took over as co-chairs in February 2015. The second part of the 58-page final report of the MDPC (The Ithaca Plan: A Public Health and Safety Approach to Drugs and Drug Policy) is called "The Scope of the Problem in Ithaca." In this chapter the committee drags together what meager statistics exist locally to document the scale of drug use here. They present property crimes in the city of Ithaca and in Tompkins County, which have been rising steadily since 2005 (because addicts steal to raise money for drugs). Drug law violation arrests, however, have been generally fallen over the same period in the city-after Myrick asked the police to make marijuana arrests a low priority- and generally increased in the county. In 2010 the Controlled Substance Act was amended to make procuring prescription drugs illegally much more difficult. People taking Oxycontin, Vicodin and other opiate-based painkillers, suddenly could no longer get the pharmaceuticals to which they were addicted; they turned to cheaper, more available heroin in droves. Between 2011 and 2013 in Monroe County, where the medical examiner's office keeps death statistics, four out of five heroin overdose deaths are white males with an average age of 35 years old. Most of the victims were from outside the city of Rochester. We don't know as much about the demographics of our local opioid problem because there is no public record of who overdoses or dies from what. The county health department was able to provide the MDPC with numbers for "drug-related deaths" between 2004 and 2014. They jumped from between one and eight per year before 2010 to between 10 and 15 per year after. Given our relatively small population (104,000 in the whole county), we are experiencing more drug-related deaths per 100,000 residents than Onondaga County (467,000 residents) in every year since 2005. The MDPC documents the dearth of drug treatment available locally: very few Suboxone prescribers, no methadone clinic, no detox facilities, and a long line for treatment programs, which demand that you enter clean and sober and remain abstinent. It addresses the limited availability and access to education programs designed to prevent young people from slipping into chronic drug use and explores the shortcomings of law enforcement as a tool, including accusations of structural racism. The proposed supervised injection facility comes under the "harm reduction" domain. STAP's needle exchange program is the most prominent harm reduction program in place, but the MDPC found that few local people understand the concept of harm reduction. Not only does the public needed to be educated about illegal drugs so they won't start taking them, but they need to be educated about who takes drugs and why. The MDPC suggests we treat illegal drug use as primarily a public health problem, with law enforcement playing only a supporting role. It is time to lay down our arms. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom