East Rock Backs ​“Stop APT” Drive After Debate

The East Rock Community Management Team voted to oppose a proposed methadone clinic in the next-door Newhallville neighborhood, after passionate discussion over whether such a stance would further stigmatize people with opioid use disorder.

That vote and debate took place Monday evening during the management team’s online monthly meeting.

The back-and-forth echoed conversations in the Hill and in other cities about how to balance the sore need for stigmatized treatment centers with the fact that those centers are often concentrated in Black and Brown neighborhoods. 

Members of the Newhallville-Hamden Strong coalition of activists have been appearing at management team meetings across the city over the past month to request letters of support in their mission to stop a proposed new APT Foundation office and methadone clinic location at a former school building at 794 Dixwell Ave. They plan to submit those letters of support, as well as a petition of individual signatures, to the city in the coming weeks.

Newhallville community members Carlota Clark and Gary Gates presented before the East Rock Community Management Team on Monday evening, where they shared the arguments they and other neighborhood residents had made at meetings, door-knocking sessions, and a rally: that while they support access to substance use disorder treatment, they worry that a Newhallville methadone clinic would attract more drug use and sales.

They pointed to complaints of such activity from neighbors of the APT Foundation’s Hill location. They argued that APT should relocate to an environment with more concentrated medical resources, rather than a ​“residential neighborhood.”

The activists’ arrival at the East Rock management team marked an effort to reach out to a neighborhood adjacent to Newhallville, but on the other side of income and racial inequality in New Haven. While both neighborhoods have active management teams and strong community cultures, East Rock is a majority-white area with many Yale students and professors, while Newhallville is a majority-Black area with the lowest percentage of ​“high income” residents in the city, per a DataHaven analysis in 2016.

East Rock resident and harm-reduction pionneer Robert Heimer, a Yale School of Public Health professor who researches injection drug use, offered pushback.

“I don’t want to get into an argument about where to site a clinic,” he said, ​“but I do want to discuss the very serious issue of opioid overdose rates going up in this state and this city.”

Overdose deaths have gone up by 20 percent over the past year, he said, and methadone treatment can significantly reduce the risk of death by overdose. 

“The most effective treatment for opioid use disorder is methadone,” Heimer said. ​“We need more clinic sites in this city and this state… It’s gotta go somewhere, or we’re just gonna keep seeing overdose deaths.” He argued that methadone reduces an individual’s likelihood of committing a crime. 

Heimer noted that in the case of a murder near the Hill clinic that activists have pointed to as an example of nearby crime, a methadone patient was the victim, not the perpetrator, of the crime.

Kim Harris, who chairs the Newhallville Community Management Team, affirmed that she supports patients seeking methadone treatment. She described an encounter with a neighbor she had known for a long time, who revealed to her in a discussion about the APT proposal that he takes methadone. ​“The need that is out there, I agree,” Harris said. But she quoted the neighbor who told her, ​“Ms. Kim, if that clinic comes to our neighborhood, Newhallville will become the drug capital of the world.” 

Harris argued that Newhallville is not a neutral place to site a methadone clinic. A petition circulated by activists of Newhallville reads, ​“We are already fighting against the structural racism that confronts us every time we leave our homes, which has further been exacerbated by the disproportionate impact of COVID deaths, school closures, digital divides, unemployment, crime and gun violence.”

“We’re a traumatized community,” Harris said.

Maritza Spell, a Newhallville resident, echoed those words.

“We are facing a lot of trauma as it is, and we want to recover from this trauma. We don’t want anything added to it,” she said. ​“We are not against treatment. We just don’t want it where our kids have to stomach it. I have friends in the Hill who said their parking lot of the APT foundation is a transaction area for drugs.”

East Rock resident Lorena Mitchell wrote in the chat: ​“I am concerned about how we are further stigmatizing addiction with this conversation.“

Rachel Mihalko added, ​“Agree, Lorena. You never know who is recovering from addiction.”

Alder Steve Winter, whose ward spans parts of both Newhallville and East Rock, spoke up in favor of writing the letter. ​“I get complaints about drug dealing in my section of Newhallville. The drug trade is thriving already, and we do know that from seeing our neighbors in the Hill that drug transactions will occur” outside APT, he argued. ​“I think it’s incredible what the APT Foundation does … but I think it is a significant downside for a neighborhood that has significant drug trafficking as there is. … There’s concern about essentially bringing in a whole new market in drugs.”

Winter called for a more centrally-located methadone clinic Downtown, ​“in a place that is regulated.” 

While activists have, in the past, pointed to other methadone clinics that have fewer issues with crime, Heimer defended APT as a low-barrier-to-entry clinic. Low levels of security and police presence are necessary in order to encourage patients to seek treatment, he argued.

As the conversation came to a close, East Rock Management Team members voted 15 to 2 to submit the letter of support to the Newhallville activists.

Meanwhile, the state’s Bond Commission is scheduled to vote Thursday on whether to grant $2 million to a partnership promoting an alternative plan for the site, a ​“Resilience Academy” focused on families’ mental health. Click here to read about that.