Editor’s note: This commentary is by Steve May, of Richmond, who is a clinical social worker who has worked in addiction medicine for the last 15 years across multiple agencies in Vermont. He is a member of the Richmond Selectboard and was a Progressive and Democratic candidate for a House seat in 2016.
[P]eople can’t simply be boiled down to a lowest common denominator. People are not mismatched socks, they are made of flesh and bone. This reality seems to have been missed by many of the people working to fight the opiate crisis here in Vermont.
With all the attention on the drugs — oxycodone, fentanyl and carfentanyl — we have lost sight of a few truths. This crisis is about people, not drugs. Those afflicted aren’t their drug of choice. He’s not an oxy. She’s not a pillhead. The people who are misusing these drugs are our children, our parents, our siblings. They aren’t some imaginary “them” to be demonized for politics sake. They are us.
That means that “they” are coming home. Home is the very place where we live with them together. We are talking about our neighbors and friends. They are going back to the very same places they were raised in and it is in those places they will rebuild their lives.
When addicts and alcoholics leave their rehab facility some 18, 21 or 28 days after being admitted, they may need to get transitional housing before they move on to their home communities. This happens for variety of reasons. It might be that home is part of what contributes to an individual’s pattern substance use. It might mean that they struggle with people, places and things where they were before and returning might put their efforts to establish “wellbrity” at-risk. It might mean that somebody at home had threatened them with some kind of physical or emotional harm, and there is a well-founded belief that injury may result from returning to that residential environment.
Without question there are too few treatment beds in our state and too great a need for resources supporting inpatient care. That however, is just the beginning of the story. We need to commit resources reintegration of addicts and alcoholics into their home communities.
A sober living home is a transitional housing arrangement where participating residents are expected to tend to routine activities in order to maintain their resident status. These responsibilities usually include making their own bed, cooking their own meals, assisting in community chores (such as vacuuming or taking out the trash), obtaining or seeking employment, attending house meetings, attending 12-step meetings, being actively involved in their own recovery, and paying their rent on time. Most sober living homes have a house manager who is responsible for the daily activities of the residents. These houses are the kinds of places where people can begin to restart their lives. Unfortunately, there are too few of these kinds of programs around our state, and the programs that do exist have too few beds to meet the statewide demand.
Ultimately, as a society, we can’t be of the belief that we have disposable people among us. At the end of day, treating not just the epidemiological parts of addiction as a disease but the whole condition as it affects entire family systems — individuals and the people who love them, and their communities of origin, and the communities where they choose to live — is critical. We as a society need to better fund transitional housing and not assign stigma to the individuals who need to use those services to restart their lives.