This commentary is by Ed Baker of Burlington. He is a person in recovery from addiction, and an independent activist for the establishment of overdose prevention centers in Vermont.
I’m sending this letter in support of H.72 with a sense of utmost urgency.
I am a person in recovery from drug addiction of the most severe order. I have been unhoused; hospitalized; incarcerated; contracted Hepatitis C; subjected to coerced treatments; and suffered through the pervasive gauntlets of stigma and the War on Drugs. I used drugs/alcohol in a harmful manner from age 16 through age 37; with a significant portion of this period engaged in injection drug use and the many life-threatening behaviors this entails.
I am now 77 years of age and hold undergraduate and graduate degrees in social services from Fordham University in New York City. I am a past Revson Fellow at Columbia University, also in NYC. I am retired from a 30-plus year career in social work and mental health/addictions counseling in Vermont. I am the host/producer of the Addiction Recovery Channel on CCTV. I am the 2021 recipient of the Vermont Alliance for Mental Health and Addiction Recovery’s Jack Barry Award for Excellence in Recovery Advocacy.
I come at this issue with a wealth of lived experience, over 30 years practicing as a dually licensed therapist working directly with this population, grounded in the available research, and having personally interviewed multiple internationally recognized experts in this field (Dr. Nora Volkow, NIDA; Maia Szlavitz, author; Dan Ciccarone, MD, researcher at UCSF; John Kelly, MD, researcher, Harvard Medical School: Brandon Marshall, MD, researcher, Brown University; Kailin See, project coordinator, OnPoint NYC; Johann Hari, author; Ann Livingston, co-founder of Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users/OnSite Vancouver BC).
This past year, I spent time in the Tenderloin District, San Francisco; the Kensington West District, Philadelphia; and City Hall Park, Burlington. I visited with people who were unhoused, underfed, addicted to drugs, with mental health challenges. I was once one of them. But I lived and achieved recovery. I characterize these people as “about to die” and I’m more than certain some of the people I’ve met with this past year are no longer living. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that for the 12-month period ending August 2023 there were 112,000 deaths in America due to accidental drug overdose.
This is a matter of moral imperative for me, as I believe it may well be for you.
The science is in. Overdose prevention centers are efficacious and immediate. They save lives now, and they provide supportive services over time that succeed in connecting many of their guests to other health promoting services. They save city government significant amounts of revenue through savings in police and fire department responses, emergency and ER services, in-hospital services and sanitation services.
The need for these centers is documented in Vermont, mainly in the downtown Burlington area, where the mayor, City Council, state’s attorney and many health service providers and Burlingtonians have expressed their strong support. People who use drugs in this area have also responded to polling very favorably, citing willingness to use an overdose prevention center. These centers can easily be scaled to a city of Burlington’s size, and in addition rural models exist in Canada that can be replicated here in rural sections of Vermont.
H.72 is our hope right now. We saw H.728 vetoed and were set back significantly in our efforts to save the lives of fellow Vermonters at high risk of overdose death.
We see significant resistance and opposition to implementing this science-based, medically necessary intervention even now, with the number of deaths in Vermont increasing steadily year after year with no sign of letting up. Funds are proposed through H.72, and also potentially available through the Opioid Abatement Settlement Advisory Committee. With the science conclusive, the need immediate and pervasive, and the funding available it is clear that the decisive burden rests upon our state legislature.
There are many Vermonters today with no voice, literally. They are about to die. If our government will not be there for them, who will?
If you would like to join this effort to save lives in Vermont, please express your support in your own words. Send your email to Chair Ginny Lyons at vlyons@leg.state.vt.us and committee assistant Kiki Carasi-Schwartz at kcarasi-schwartz@leg.state.vt.us
