nothin Fair Haven Doctors See Lesson In K2 Poisonings | New Haven Independent

Fair Haven Doctors See Lesson In K2 Poisonings

Thomas Breen photo

Ned Lamont and Chris Murphy with Fair Haven Community Health Care’s Suzanne Lagarde.

It’s not just opioids.

So health care workers on the front lines of New Haven’s and America’s drug crisis told a visiting U.S. senator and Democratic nominee for governor at a roundtable discussion Friday afternoon a mile away from the New Haven Green, where city emergency responders attended to a wave of over 100 K2” synthetic-marijuana-related poisonings on Wednesday and Thursday.

That event served as a reminder that the drug crisis extends well beyond opiates like heroin and fentanyl, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and gubernatorial Ned Lamont were told at the roundtable discussion with a dozen doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in a second-floor conference room at the Fair Haven Community Health Care’s main offices at 374 Grand Ave.

The conversation came at the tail end of a week in which the city was rocked by over 100 calls to transport people primarily on the New Haven Green who had been poisoned by a bad batch of the synthetic marijuana product K2 mixed with the synthetic cannabinoid AMB-FUBINACA.

(Public health experts argue that what happened on the Green during this week’s public health crisis were not overdoses,” since overdosing refers to intentionally or accidentally taking too much of a substance that one knows about. Instead, they argue, that over a hundred cases of poisoning” occurred, since the victims did not know exactly what they were getting.)

Friday’s roundtable.

At Friday afternoon’s roundtable, doctors at the community health clinic told Murphy and Lamont that this week’s crisis is a good reminder that New Haveners, and Americans more broadly, struggle with a range of addictions, not just opioid addictions.

One of my patients was found on the New Haven Green last night,” said Dr. Krystn Wagner. She said he apparently overdoses on K2. She said he uses cocaine, PCP, and alcohol, but no opiates.

The opiate epidemic has the risk of reducing our awareness to other things,” Wagner said.

She said that many young people in New Haven use marijuana regularly, and that the city’s public health community does not yet have a good response. In particular, she said, doctors and public health professionals need to be in the schools, educating young people about the different types of substances.

Murphy said that the opioid crisis has rightly gotten a lot of public attention over the past few years, but that shouldn’t happen at the expense of pulling money from other drug treatment programs.

Douglas Olson (at left in photo).

Douglas Olson, the community health center’s vice president of clinical affairs, said that the health center’s doctors don’t always have conversations with patients about the risks of marijuana anymore, because marijuana has always been a much safer substance than heroin.

That’s not true anymore,” he said. One fleck of fentanyl makes that entire marijuana plant deadly. We’re starting to have those conversations. We [as a country] are probably behind the curve.”

When you are getting a product off the street,” Murphy said, you have no idea what’s in it.” He said one of the arguments made by people who support the legalization of recreational marijuana is that legalizing and regulating the substance will ensure that users do not stumble onto a batch that has been tainted with a toxic chemical.

When asked about specific barriers that New Haven medical professionals face in addressing substance abuse disorders in the community, Olson said the federal government’s strict certification costs and requirements for prescribing buprenorphine and suboxone, which are used for treating heroin addiction, make it unduly difficult for local providers to treat people with opiate dependencies.

On the medical side, there’s a barrier there,” he said. He said community health centers like Fair Haven’s would be able to free up more money for opiate addiction treatment if the DEA put a three-year freeze on certified providers having to pay for their annual licenses to prescribe buprenorphine and suboxone.

Maya Spell (right).

Maya Spell, the health center’s substance abuse care coordinator, said she always struggles with finding enough inpatient beds and detox beds for people being treated for opiate addictions.

On Wednesday when you had all these people dropping on the Green,” she said, they went to the emergency room, they sobered them up, and then they released them right back to the Green. What good is that? They’re not getting any care.”

Murphy said one of the key challenges that local communities face in adding inpatient substance abuse treatment beds is that the federal government currently prohibits Medicaid dollars from being used for long-term treatment beds. He said he is trying to get the provision of that law repealed, but that that would be expensive, and Republicans in office are more interested in giving tax breaks to the wealthy than with funding adequate substance abuse treatment.

Lamont said that, if elected governor, he would seriously consider establishing a cabinet-level opioid czar,” who would be charged with coordinating responses to the opioid crisis across such departments as the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, the Department of Public Health, the Department of Consumer Protection, and the Department of Education.

Connecticut politicians and medical professional should be not just shining a light on the problem,” he said, but finding ways we can coordinate the best comprehensive response.”

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full roundtable discussion.

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
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

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