“What the governor did, and continues to do, is he has given people the courage to speak about addiction openly,” Donovan told a group of social workers and reporters at the Howard Center’s Baird School in Burlington on Wednesday.
“That’s the one thing that I don’t think any data or stat will ever show, the stigma, the shame and guilt that has been washed aside because of the leadership of Peter Shumlin,” he said.
Donovan joined the governor, officials from the Agency of Human Services and the Howard Center to tout results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health that show drug use is down among young adults in Vermont. The survey results are from 2013 and predate Shumlin’s push to address addiction, but officials said they are encouraging nonetheless.
Vermont’s efforts in the past year to reform how addiction is treated in the criminal justice system and the state’s capacity for treating addicts has made a difference, but there is more work that needs to be done, Shumlin said.
The state has increased the number of opiate treatment slots by roughly 1,000 in the past year, but there are still people waiting for treatment. The growing acceptance that addiction is a disease has increased the number of people seeking treatment, Shumlin said.
“We’ve created our own demand. That’s a good thing, but we’ve got to find a way to continue to build out our treatment,” he said.
At the Howard Center’s Chittenden Clinic, the largest treatment hub in the state, there are 972 people receiving addiction services, a 40 percent increase from the same time last year, according to Bob Bick, the organization’s executive director.
“We still have a wait list … but we have no pregnant women on the wait list,” he said, adding that there are 28 pregnant women receiving treatment.
At any given time, 30 percent to 50 percent of the Howard Center’s opiate addiction clients have hepatitis C, which the center is able to help them address, Bick said, showing that treatment has a broader impact on health than just addressing substance abuse.
The state must continue to support services and treatment options that allow for early intervention with users to give Vermont the best chance of “staunching” the growth of opiate abuse, Bick said.
Shumlin said his 2015 budget increases “our overall treatment dollars” by 16 percent, or $5 million, and will expand early intervention measures in health care and criminal justice settings.
During the past year, 13,000 Vermonters were screened by their health care provider for “evidence-based protocols” to identify nascent substance abuse problems, Shumlin said.
Vermont is also implementing Act 95, Shumlin said, which creates a statewide system to allow case managers to gather more information about people who have been arrested, in hopes of getting them the mental health and substance abuse services they need. The state is staffing more county courts with case workers who can, when appropriate, divert people into treatment, rather than the criminal justice system.
The program will give people whose addiction is driving their criminal behavior a chance to turn their lives around, and it also saves taxpayers money, Shumlin said. It costs $1,138 per week to incarcerate someone versus $123 per week for substance abuse treatment, he said.
Defense attorney David Sleigh recently filed for an injunction to halt the pretrial services program from being implemented in Orleans County on the grounds that it violates a person’s constitutional right against self incrimination. Shumlin said he will do what he can to make sure the lawsuit doesn’t derail the pretrial services program.
His administration and the judiciary are working to write rules to ensure that people don’t compromise their rights because they’ve opted for rapid intervention, Shumlin said.
“We’ve been very clear we won’t let that happen … I understand (Sleigh’s) concern, but it does concern me that, while we all have good intentions, we don’t want to put up a roadblock to the progress we’re making into a much smarter and more compassionate way to deal with this disease,” Shumlin said.
Vermont is making strides in the distribution of naloxone to addicts, their families and loved ones, when opiate addiction spirals out of control and leads to an overdose, Shumlin said. Naloxone is a drug effective in reversing opiate overdoses.
Shumlin told the audience that in the past year more than 800 naloxone kits were distributed, and at least 80 were used to reverse a potentially fatal overdose.
“That’s 80 people that may well be on this earth, who would not have been had we not been so aggressive,” he said.
Health Department Commissioner Harry Chen said the number of reversals was closer to 100. Bick, with the Howard Center, said both state officials had the wrong numbers because the Howard Center alone has distributed 1,387 naloxone kits and has documented 133 reversals.
“Thank you for those numbers,” Shumlin said, “We’re in state government, we’ll get ‘em in about two weeks.”
