Sen. Patty Murray visits Yakima to talk drug abuse treatment legislation
By: Molly Rosbach
Yakima Herald
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray visited Yakima on Tuesday to talk about newly proposed legislation on substance abuse and mental health treatment, and to hear from recovering addicts about where they feel the system needs improvement most.
The event was held at Triumph Treatment Services, which provides outpatient and residential treatment for men and pregnant or parenting women who struggle with chemical dependency.
“As you all know firsthand, the epidemic of prescription drug and heroin abuse has caused enormous pain across our state for far too long, and it’s only getting worse,” Murray said to a group of treatment specialists and program participants. “Too often, those struggling with addiction are left to cycle in and out of the criminal justice system rather than being put on a path to recovery.”
She called on staff and participants at Triumph to make their voices heard so she can learn how best to address their needs.
Murray’s proposal is the Mental Health Reform Act of 2016, on which she worked closely with the Republican chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. It’s meant to build upon the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which just recently passed the Senate and now moves on to the House.
The mental health act includes specific substance abuse provisions, such as expanding access to medication-assisted treatment for those struggling with addiction, increasing resources to prevent overdose deaths, strengthening states’ prescription drug-monitoring programs to crack down on abuse, and improving coordination among local agencies involved in crisis response.
Capt. Jeff Schneider with the Yakima Police Department, who also spoke at the news conference, said he welcomes any effort to improve access and affordability of treatment options.
“We have an awful lot of people who are addicted to opioids, heroin, even as far down as the high schools,” he said before Tuesday’s event. “And overwhelmingly, the people that I talk to that are addicted — they don’t want to be addicted, but they don’t have access to treatment, whether because it’s not available or it’s not affordable or both.”
Preventive programs that intervene before addiction becomes wholly destructive are crucial, he said, to avoid the kind of consequences that police deal with — from fatal overdoses to crimes such as shoplifting and burglary that addicts commit in order to support their drug habits.
“We look at treatment as a crime prevention measure,” Schneider said.
When Triumph first started, executive director Beth Danhardt said at the event, heroin was not a big issue.
But with the development of strong prescription painkillers in the 1980s — and the ensuing demand and high price of those drugs on the street — cheap heroin became the go-to option.
“We now have more people dying of heroin addiction and opioid addiction than we have people dying of automobile accidents,” Danhardt said. “It’s really, really important that we help people with this addiction.”
In recent years, Schneider said, there has been a shift in the form of heroin used, and in the demographics of heroin users. Black tar heroin, which is injected, has been largely replaced by brown powder heroin, which is smoked.
“You see a more affluent group of people using heroin now, because it costs a little more and it doesn’t have the stigma of having needle marks from IV drug use,” he said.
However, brown powder is much stronger than black tar; Schneider said the potency goes up to 40 percent compared with 5 to 8 percent with black tar.
That’s contributed to a steady rise in fatal overdoses, he said: In 2015, there were 29 fatal heroin overdoses in Yakima County, along with “hundreds” of nonfatal overdoses.
Tyler Douglas knows all too well the dire consequences of heroin abuse. Now a recovery support specialist at Triumph, he says he still sees friends die of overdose, “and it sucks.”
At the event, he shared that he started out with pot and prescription drugs at age 15, which turned into full-blown addiction and IV drug use by 19.
“At a certain point ... my disease had kicked in, and no matter how hard I wanted to stop, I couldn’t stop,” he said.
He tried treatment twice, each time failing to stay clean after the program ended. But two years ago, he said, he made the decision that he was done, and with the help of Triumph’s programs has been able to keep it that way.
He’ll celebrate two years’ sobriety on Friday.
“I don’t have to live in the hell that people who are in active addiction have to,” he said. “That’s due to family, that’s due to the support ... and I hope what Ms. Murray’s trying to do will help support other addicts.”
