Meeting to address hard drug use issue
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TweetA town hall meeting will be held June 1 to address what police and some health officials say is a rise in hard drug use.
Besides anecdotal evidence, local data supporting the claim is spotty and rumor is driving some of the conversation.
Public safety officials along with community members are invited to participate in the meeting starting at 5:30 p.m. at a location to be determined.
Public safety commission chair Jim Stanford said during a public safety commission meeting earlier this month that he’s concerned about kids using drugs. He said he’s heard rumors that “junior high students are doing meth.”
Haines school district principal Renee Martin said she would be surprised if that were true.
“That I have never heard,” Martin said. “I have never heard that. I don’t even know that my high schoolers are doing meth.”
She said she is concerned about rising drug use in the community, and that it could trickle into the schools. She said she’s heard from students that a young adult population is using hard drugs.
Stanford said in a separate interview he hopes people come out to the meeting, especially “those in the trenches” including teachers, EMS staff and SEARHC health professionals.
“How much of this is rumor and how much of this is fact, facts that you can prove?” Stanford asked.
Some data is available. Last year, ambulance crews provided Narcan, a medication used to block the effects of opioid overdoses, eight times, according to fire chief Brian Clay.
Haines Borough police chief Heath Scott reported to the commission that emergency medical services staff have given out Narcan four times in the last month to different individuals of differing backgrounds.
“Combine that with the discussion I’ve had offline with the SEARHC clinic who’s going to start an intravenous drug needles exchange program and now we have a couple points of data for concern,” Scott said.
SEARHC administrator Pat Hefley said he travelled to Anchorage earlier this month to attend meetings about needle exchanges, but that at this time, the agency has no plans to implement one.
Scott said he didn’t think recent overdoses were related to a break-in at the SEARHC clinic where fentanyl, a dangerously potent synthetic opioid, was apparently stolen.
Some of the recent overdoses involved heroin, Scott said. There are no updates to the clinic break-in, Scott wrote in an email to the CVN.
At the public safety meeting, Scott said he likes to use data when looking at problems and cited stats around the region indicating that drug use in Haines will become a problem.
“Our rural area and our remoteness isn’t going to fend this off for very much longer,” Scott said. “I think we’re in the throes of it.”
Scott cited a 300 percent rise in burglaries in Juneau, likely associated with drug addiction, during the past two years.
The Juneau Police Department investigated 310 burglaries in 2016 up from 101 in 2014, a 201 percent increase, according to Juneau police data.
Scott said he also had concerns about overdose deaths in Whitehorse.
“I’d really like to see what’s going on in Whitehorse,” Scott said. “I don’t have factual data but I heard some information just in the last quarter that they’ve had six overdose deaths contributed to fentanyl.”
Five deaths have been attributed to fentanyl in the Yukon Territory since April, 2016 according to a recent Yukon coroner’s office press release.
Scott said he hasn’t seen a significant rise in burglary in Haines.
Between July 2014 to July 2016 there’s been one felony drug case and six felony property crime cases filed against Haines defendants in Superior Court, according to Alaska court records. Ten misdemeanor property crime cases and one misdemeanor drug case was filed in Haines District Court.
Alaska Gov. Bill Walker issued a statewide “Declaration of Disaster Emergency” in February as result of a significant increase in opioid overdose deaths in the state.
Scott told the public safety commission they might be able to get resources as a result of that disaster declaration.
Scott said he did not want the police department “to enforce the problem away.”
“The criminal justice system is not a place to get sober or to fix those problems,” Scott said. “We do not want to enforce that problem away if we can have a positive effect on sobriety.”
