ATLANTA — Northampton’s Drug Addiction Response Team (DART) was one of nine programs from across the country touted Monday as promising initiatives in the fight against opioid deaths at the annual RX Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit.
J. Cherry Sullivan, coordinator for Hampshire HOPE, the countywide opioid prevention coalition run out of the Northampton Health Department, explained to an audience of more than 1,300 people that the DART program sprang out of ideas collected in previous years at the summit, the largest prescription drug and heroin conference in the country. DART launched in Northampton in February of 2016, expanding to 20 other Hampshire County communities in 2018.
The DART program sends teams of police, harm reduction educators and recovery coaches out to visit with people who have recently survived an opioid overdose, aiming to talk and to build relationships.
Sullivan explained that the program was born out of a desire to save lives, especially when people are at high risk for death by overdose.
One such time is following a non-fatal overdose.
“Every non-fatal overdose is an opportunity for some sort of intervention, some sort of connection with people, and we really wanted to capitalize on that moment,” Sullivan said.
The summit, first held in 2012, draws 3,000 to 4,000 people from around the country from local, state and federal levels of government, as well as elected leaders and members of other professional sectors addressing the epidemic, including treatment providers, academic researchers, law enforcement, and public health and prevention specialists. Also in the mix: people ensnared in opioid addiction, including those in recovery or seeking recovery, and family of people in recovery or of those who have died in opioid-related deaths.
Some years the summit scores big-name presenters. This year, President Donald Trump and Melania Trump are scheduled to address conference-goers in a keynote address Wednesday. In 2016, President Obama appeared on stage with a panel of experts and people in recovery talking about the emerging issues of the day.
Joining Sullivan for the four-day conference is a large delegation from Hampshire County, including Michele Farry, assistant program coordinator for Hampshire HOPE, Amherst Assistant Fire Chief Jeff Olmstead and Northampton Police Detective Adam Van Buskirk, who was Northampton’s first DART officer. Also among the contingent are Northampton Patrol Officers Justin Hooten, Thomas Briotta, Honora Sullivan-Chin, Heather Longley and Hadley Patrol Officer Janelle Seitz, a DART officer in that town.
In Massachusetts, Sullivan noted in her talk, 1 in 10 people will die within two years after a non-fatal overdose.
“It’s a high-risk period,” she said. “The driving, central question for us is: How do we close the gap? How do we make sure that people are not dying?”
Rather than trying to force treatment onto anyone, DART takes a harm-reduction approach in which team members ask questions to assess the person’s safety level and whether or not they are open to treatment. They discuss how to use in safer ways, provide people with the overdose-reversal drug naloxone (commonly known by the brand name Narcan) and offer information about medication-assisted treatment and other interventions available to them.
Another time people are at high risk is after being released from incarceration (and a period of abstinence), according to data from the state Department of Public Health.
“We know people leaving jail, post-incarceration, are at high, high risk of overdose death,” Sullivan said. “They are 120 times more likely to die than the general population, and that’s not OK.”
In a Q&A period, summit participants had numerous questions for Sullivan, asking about the database being created to track DART progress; how DART teams are funded; whether there has been pushback or fear expressed by opioid users around being approached by police officers; and why DART uses police officers rather than fire department or EMS personnel.
Sullivan explained that the development team creating the database can customize one for other communities and that DART police departments receive small federal grants funneled through Hampshire HOPE to cover training and overtime costs. But that is temporary.
“What we envision is that this becomes part of the culture of all 20 departments,” she said.
“It’s complicated,” she said of the reaction from people within drug-using communities. Some of them, she said, already have relationships with police officers, while with others, police try hard to build trust while working alongside harm reduction educators and recovery coaches. “One thing the officers stress is that we are not there to collect information for law enforcement, and they have to be true to that,” she said. “It takes time to build trust.”
As to the choice to integrate police into the post-overdose response teams: “I don’t think there’s a right or wrong here,” she said. “It just happened that the Northampton Police Department was the department that stepped up and said, ‘We want to do this.’”
Afterward, Sullivan was swarmed by people seeking more information about the program and the developing database systems being created to track its progress.
Presenting along with Sullivan was a nurse from Yavapai County in Arizona talking about a new program that brings police and schoolteachers together to encourage trauma-informed school responses when children have experienced family crises related to substance misuse or other traumas.
In addition, a state health official from Pennsylvania reported on what happened after that state declared a public health emergency due to its alarming opioid death rate (13 deaths per day) and how state officials came together in ways similar to natural disaster responses, setting up an emergency command center and requiring interagency collaboration at the highest levels. An epidemiologist in Tennessee also reported on a program that works with incarcerated women with a history of drug use to educate them about the dangers of neonatal abstinence syndrome in an effort to prevent it.
Capt. Daniel Morley of the sheriff’s office in Saratoga County, New York, talked about several initiatives in that county, including one that distributes naloxone and trains people to use it.
“So when the person does hopefully get that aha! moment, they’re still alive to do it,” he said.
Morley provoked applause in the room when he said, “We need to stop treating opioid misuse like a criminal offense and start treating it like the disease that it is.”
The summit offers daily keynote talks and plenary sessions as well as dozens of breakout sessions that go into depth about promising and evidence-based initiatives, new research findings and information from federal law enforcement about drug trafficking patterns and national efforts to stem the illegal and deadly supply of opiates.
The breakout sessions are organized into tracks, such as public health, prevention, law enforcement, treatment providers, federal government, social work, corrections and harm reduction, so that people can easily focus on sessions most relevant to their work.
Laurie Loisel, director of outreach and education at the office of Northwestern District Attorney David E. Sullivan, is accompanying the Hampshire HOPE delegation at the RX Drug & Heroin Summit as a guest of Hampshire HOPE specifically to file news reports out of the conference.