Thomas Breen photo
Fire Chief John Alston Jr., Police Chief Anthony Campbell on the Green Monday national drug czar Jim Carroll.
In a visit to New Haven Monday, President Trump’s drug czar promised that more federal dollars are on the way to help cities respond to the type of widespread drug abuse that led to over 100 overdoses last week on the New Haven Green.
But he also stressed that addiction is a “personal crisis for individuals” that is best responded to at the local level, even when supported by state and federal resources.
Jim Carroll, the acting director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, delivered that message of local leadership and federal support in a conversation during a tour of the New Haven Green after a press conference at the Connecticut Mental Health Center at 34 Park St.
Monday’s press conference at the Connecticut Mental Health Center on Park Street.
Carroll joined Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, Mayor Toni Harp, and a range of state commissioners and local emergency responders for the press conference after participating in a roundtable conversation with the local and state representatives. The spark for the visit and the roundtable: last week’s public health crisis last week, when the city responded to over 100 overdoses, primarily on the Green, resulting from a bad batch of the synthetic marijuana K2, which was mixed with the synthetic cannabinoid AMB-FUBINACA.
Carroll, Malloy, and Harp said that the roundtable conversation, which was closed to the press, focused as much on the opioid epidemic more broadly as on the synthetic cannabinoid drugs that caused the overdoses in New Haven last week.
After the press conference, Carroll joined Police Chief Anthony Campbell and Fire Chief John Alston, Jr. for a tour of the New Haven Green, where even today people were overdosing on a different batch of K2.
“We just missed an overdose right here,” Alston informed them upon arrival.
Carroll: This is a “personal crisis for individuals.”
“In an incident like this,” Carroll said, “where there is an emergency, you don’t call D.C. You don’t call an 800 number for an office for the federal government. You call 9 – 1‑1.”
He said the Trump administration has quadrupled funding to combat the opioid epidemic from around $1 billion in last year’s federal budget to over $4 billion in this year’s federal budget. But, he said, local communities like New Haven should take the lead in deciding how to spend that money.
“This should be a community-lead effort,” he said, commending the work of New Haven’s emergency medical responders, police, firefighters, and politicians last Wednesday and Thursday in ensuring that all overdose victims were tended to and ensuring that no one died.
“At the end of the day, this is a personal crisis for individuals,” he said.
He said the federal government plans to combat the opioid epidemic and drug addiction in this country more broadly through a combination of prevention and education, increasing access to treatment, and law enforcement. He said many of the synthetic drugs in the United States today, whether they be synthetic opiates like fentanyl or synthetic weed like K2 and AMB-FUBINACA, come into this country from Mexico and China.
Malloy: “Addiction is a mental health issue.”
“There was by and large agreement on the matters,” Malloy said about his conversation with Carroll on understanding and fighting the opioid epidemic at the local, state and national levels. “That addiction is a mental health issue, that we have to treat it as such.”
He praised Carroll as practical and knowledgeable and open to what Harp and Malloy told him about New Haven’s experience last week.
“He gave a listening ear to those kinds of things that we need in this community to address this problem,” Harp said about Carroll.
Malloy also stressed that the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DHMS) stepped up last week in providing additional supplies of Narcan to New Haven before city responders knew that the overdoses were being caused by synthetic marijuana, not opiates.
“It was appropriately a much bigger discussion” than just being about K2, he said. “We were seeing partial recoveries from K2 in as little as 15 minutes. But the vast majority of people who were falling victim to K2 in this particular case also had other forms of addiction which have been thus far unsuccessfully treated.”
He said that his administration has created 26,000 units of affordable housing in Connecticut since taking office, and that having stable housing is ultimately the most effective long-term remedy for drug addiction.
Campbell with Carroll.
Harp said she has secured a commitment from the DHMS commissioner for the state to hire and send to New Haven more recovery coaches and a street psychiatrist, who will be able to walk around the Green and work with victims of drug addiction on the spot, as opposed to requiring them to come to the hospital or a doctor’s office first.
“We’re going to build a deeper service-delivery mechanism in conjunction with DHMS,” Harp said.
She also praised her police chief, fire chief, emergency management chief, and other local emergency providers for making sure that everyone who overdosed last week was responded to within one or two minutes and for making sure that everyone who allowed themselves to be transported was transported to Yale-New Haven Hospital.
“Every person got the service that they needed,” she said. “We did not lose one like, and for that I am eternally grateful.”
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full press conference.
Coverage of this week’s drug poisonings on the Green:
• OD Toll Hits 77; Cops Arrest Suspect
• Overdoses Put 911, Engine 4 To The Test
• Synthetic Cannabinoid Key Ingredient In Bad K2 Batch
•Fair Haven Doctors See Lesson In K2 Poisonings
• Stopping Suicide, Jesus Redeems Himself
• Dozens More Overdose; What’s In That K2?
• Bad K2 Went For Free
• Green Proprietors On Overdoses, Drug Scene: “We Cannot Wait”
• NORML: Legalization Would Have Prevented Overdoses
• “Place Of Despair”?
• Angel, Royce Find Refuge From Green ODs