Downtown Asks: What Next?

Build an addiction treatment center in the city’s medical district. Get surrounding suburbs to help pay for New Haven’s homelessness and healthcare services.

And make sure that people who suffer from drug addiction are heard from as the city figures out how to address the substance abuse epidemic in and around the New Haven Green.

Those were a few of the ideas bounced around on Tuesday night during a special extended session of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team’s (DWSCMT) regular monthly meeting, held on the second floor of City Hall.

Management team chair Caroline Smith and the rest of the team’s executive board held the special session after concluding regular monthly business to give community members an opportunity to respond to the public health crisis that hit the New Haven Green last week, when emergency responders tended to over 100 synthetic-marijuana-related poisonings over the course of just two days.

“This is a moment to start and to continue conversations,” Smith told the nearly 50 community members who stuck around for the 45-minute discussion. ​“We definitely recognize that any next steps will require multiple stakeholders, and in particular those who live on, who work near the Green, and those who are most affected by the issues.”

Mayoral office staffer Michael Harris kicked off the meeting with a recap of just what happened last week, and then looked forward to how Mayor Toni Harp’s administration is planning to respond.

He said that K2, the synthetic marijuana that caused last week’s overdoses, may superficially resemble marijuana, but is in fact just a mix of twigs and leaves that are sprayed with a chemical cannabinoid that is created in a lab.

He said synthetic marijuana is illegal for human consumption, though some states do allow it to be sold in corner stores under the name ​“potpourri.”

Connecticut and Massachusetts have banned all forms of synthetic marijuana. Most of the product in New Haven is brought into the state in bulk by drug dealers, who then cut it with other chemicals and sell it on the street in dime bags for as little as $2 to $5 per bag. The chemical additive that made last week’s batch so toxic, he said, is called FUBINACA.

“About half of these people were New Haven residents,” Harris said about last week’s 47 K2 overdose victims. ​“And about 60 percent were in New Haven for some type of methadone treatment.”

Although last week’s overdoses were not caused by opiates like heroin or fentanyl, he said, many of the people who did overdose were preyed upon on the Green by drug dealers looking to profit off of a particularly vulnerable population already struggling with those drug dependencies.

Harris said that the city is in talks with the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) to bring to the Green a street psychiatrist who will be able to assess people on the Green and prescribe and distribute opioid-addiction medications like buprenorphine without requiring those patients to visit a pharmacy or doctor’s office first.

He said that the city is also looking to get state support to hire recovery coaches and to set up a community recovery center near the Green that will provide not just medication but peer-to-peer support for people struggling with substance abuse.

For the next 40 minutes, management team members and visitors engaged in a specific, passionate, but always respectful conversation about how the city should respond to the opioid epidemic’s manifestation on the city’s central square.

Some, like Sunasha Nixon, said the solution lies in getting surrounding towns and suburbs to pony up more financial support for cities like New Haven, which provide homelessness, health care, and addiction treatment services for the entire region.

“It only seems fair that all of the towns in New Haven county step up to help assist,” she said. ​“If they’re not going to host and house the methadone clinics or shelters, that they do something to pour into our resources so that we can provide some wraparound services to address the issue of homelessness that we have along with the mental health issue and the drug issue. They need to be held accountable in assisting our city because they’re draining our resources.”

Lt. Mark O’Neill, the district commander for the neighborhood, confirmed that most of the people his team finds sleeping on the Green at night are candid about being methadone clients and about being in the city for the week while they receive their treatment.

He said that the actual number of people who overdosed last week who are from New Haven is probably less than 50 percent, considering how many visiting methadone clients list their address as that of the APT Foundation’s Congress Avenue methadone clinic when they are stopped by the police.

“We stop folks all the time,” O’Neill said. ​“We ask them all the time, ​‘Where do you live?’ They say, ​‘495 Congress.’”

Management team executive board member Anstress Farwell said she likes the idea of a street psychiatrist, but she thinks that the position should be part of a six-month emergency pilot as opposed to a permanent installation of medical professionals on the Green.

“You don’t want the Green to be perceived as a medical treatment center,” she said. ​“You can’t do medical treatment in an open, public space.”

Instead, she said, the city should relocate or build a dedicated addiction treatment center in the city’s medical district near Yale-New Haven Hospital just south of downtown. These types of treatment centers should not be in residential neighborhoods, she said, as evidenced by the persistent neighbor complaints and dangerous, sometimes violent activity outside of the APT Foundation in the Hill.

“Everyone says, ​‘Don’t criminalize it,’” Farwell said. “‘It’s a medical issue.’ Let’s treat it like a medical issue and be really serious about what’s happening when these people walk out the door.” Last week, a number of people overdosed multiple times on the bad batch of K2 after finding their way from the hospital back to the Green after each episode.

Farwell said a dedicated treatment center in the city’s medical district would provide safety, shelter, and dignity for patients who now have to wait in line on the street on Congress Avenue before receiving their methadone treatment.

John Shively noted that no one at the meeting on Tuesday night had actually suffered from any of last week’s overdoses. He said that the city should make sure to engage people who struggle with drug addiction as it figures out how to move forward on this issue.

Smith called on the alders who will be hosting public hearings in the next few weeks on the APT Foundation and on a homeless ​“Bill of Rights” to work with the local methadone clinic to get patients to come to City Hall and testify.

On Wednesday morning, three people who have worked on the front lines of the drug problem on the Green — Hill Health Center homeless outreach coordinator Phil Costello, Hill Health medical services chief Doug Bruce, and retired New Haven Assistant Police Chief John Velleca — dived into the roots of the issue as well as the work ahead to tackle it. That discussion took place on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. Click on the above video to watch the discussion.

Coverage of the drug poisonings on the Green:

• What Really Happened On The Green
• OD Toll Hits 77; Cops Arrest Suspect
• Overdoses Put 911, Engine 4 To The Test
• Recovery Coaches. More Cops. Moved Bus Stops?
• 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”
• Prayers Replace Silence On The Green
• NORML: Legalization Would Have Prevented Overdoses
• ​“Place Of Despair”?
• Angel, Royce Find Refuge From Green ODs
• Trump’s Drug Czar: Solutions Begin At Home