nothin Recovery Coaches. More Cops. Moved Bus Stops? | New Haven Independent

Recovery Coaches. More Cops. Moved Bus Stops?

Paul Bass Photo

Medics treating K2 victims on the Green last Wednesday.

We need help,” Mayor Toni Harp said Monday.

She was speaking about New Haven’s efforts to fight a drug epidemic that came into full view on New Haven’s Green last week, when emergency responders brought poisoned users of a bad batch of the synthetic drug K2 to the hospital over 100 times in the course of a couple of days.

Harp outlined steps the city is taking in the wake of the event — which attracted international news coverage — during her most recent appearance on WNHH FM’s Dateline New Haven” program.

Her administration has been working on some of those steps for a while, and has since initiated others. They include:

• Asking the state to reroute some of the transfer spots of CT Transit buses away from the Green. She noted that that request is four years old; recommendations from a still-ongoing state-funded study on improving the bus system in general have yet to be implemented.

• Adding more police walking beats to the Green. We’re going to make it uncomfortable for dealers to deal there,” Harp said.

• Asking a receiving a commitment from the state to return two funded social workers to the Green to work with drug users. Harp said she is also asking for state support for recovery coaches,” recovering addicts, to work there, too.

• Enlisting a Yale psychiatrist who specializes on street psychiatry” to work directly with addicts on the Green, including prescribing provide suboxone right there on the Green if someone is having difficulty.”

• Further training cops, firefighters and other city workers in the use of Narcan to revive opiate addictions who overdose.

• Opening a drop-in center for the homeless near the Green, run by Hill Health Center, with addiction help on site.

In addition, Harp repeated a call for the state to allow doctors who specialize in substance abuse treatment to distribute methadone to patients from their offices so large groups of patients don’t have to congregate at central locations like the APT Foundation’s clinics.

Harp praised New Haven’s firefighters, cops and ambulance crews for swinging into action during the crisis. No one was down for longer than two minutes,” she said. All the training paid off … They just kept at it,” even when seeing K2 users whom they’d transported earlier in the day return to the Green, still wearing hospital bracelets, to smoke the drug and collapse again.

Overall, Harp said, New Haven, like other cities, needs help” in tackling what’s a national problem, the rise of drug addiction. Too much of the country still sees it as a crime problem rather than a health problem, she said. We haven’t figured out addiction yet” or how to solve it, she noted.

Flags & Lead paint

Also on Mayor Monday,” Harp:

• Said her administration is working on improving its response to lead paint cases. It is planning to use Municity software as part of an effort to computerize more records in lead-paint cases. It is also looking at increasing landlord licensing inspections from every three years to once a year, and including a lead paint component to the program.

• Endorsed a proposal by Downtown/Yale Alder Hacibey Catalbasoglu to have a contest to design a new city flag.

• Confirmed that layoffs will indeed hit the Board of Education, along with changing some positions from 12 months a year to 10 months a year. The board will vote on those layoffs at a special Tuesday night meeting.

Click on the video to watch the full episode of WNHH FM’s Mayor Monday.”

This episode of Mayor Monday” was made possible with the support of Gateway Community College and Berchem Moses P.C.

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