Angela Coble knew she had an addiction problem, but she couldn’t seem to get the help she needed.
The Kokomo woman spent 21 years addicted to benzos and opioids, and she frequented the emergency rooms of local hospitals seeking help to get off the drugs – only to be offered more medication to help her get through withdrawals. She did a couple of stints at St. Vincent Kokomo’s Trinity House too, where she would stay for three days at a time to detox.
“But when you live as an addict for 21 years and then spend three days to clean you out – the drugs are gone, but that’s just a tiny piece of recovery,” Coble said. “The only thing that’s accomplished is you’re not using the drug. What I really needed was longer-term support after the initial detox.”
In 2007, she spent 20 days at Fairbanks Alcohol and Drug Addiction Treatment Center in Indianapolis, which launched her recovery. Coble, now 46, moved into a homeless shelter when she returned to Kokomo after rehab, and then she lived in transitional housing through Community Howard Regional Health before eventually re-uniting with her husband.
Now she works in addiction services as a certified recovery specialist peer support counselor, and it pains her that Kokomo doesn’t have any more long-term support to offer addicts than she found for herself eight years ago.
“Sometimes I feel I’m limited with the resources in Kokomo,” Coble said. “I look at my clients through the eyes of who I was and what I needed. … It breaks my heart that we don’t have the resources in Kokomo that I know they need.”
That could change in the next year if plans progress to open a combination work-release and inpatient addiction treatment center in Howard County.
The Howard County Opioid Overdose Task Force, assembled by Judge William Menges in September, has discussed the option as Community Corrections moves forward in securing a site for its work-release program. The proposal is still in a preliminary phase, though Community Corrections Director Ray Tetrault says the facility could be up and running as early as July 2016.
“This hasn’t been done anywhere before, so we’re hoping we can write our own rules a little bit to make it make sense,” Tetrault said.
Community Corrections is considering three undisclosed locations for its work-release facility, Tetrault said, and waiting to secure a grant from the Indiana Department of Correction before moving forward with purchasing a building. One of the locations would offer enough space for the 40 to 60 beds Howard County would fill with its work-release inmates, the 60 to 80 beds the Department of Correction would like to fill and then another 30 to 40 beds that could be used for the inpatient treatment facility.
Currently, the Trinity House at St. Vincent Kokomo and Community Howard Regional Health offer detoxification and short-term inpatient services for people struggling with addiction, but there is limited long-term inpatient care available locally.
“We have people who go to Trinity and [Community] Howard and they get immediate care, but then they get out and go right back to the same people as when they were using,” Tetrault said.
The inpatient addiction treatment center would give people more resources and time to get clean. Menges envisions a facility staffed by Community Corrections where professionals from the hospitals come in to offer eight to 10 hours of treatment each day for residents. Coble says long-term rehab offered her the structure, education and a full diagnosis that addressed both her addiction and her mental illness that allowed her to finally break free from addiction.
“The issue is always money, where are you going to get the money,” said Menges, who presides over Howard County Superior Court 1. “By collaborating and combining resources, we think we can get it done.”
Operating the work-release facility will cost $1.1 million to $1.3 million a year, Tetrault said, and 40 percent of that would be paid by the inmates who are sentenced to work-release with the other 60 percent coming from the Department of Correction. He thinks there are opportunities to obtain other grants to support the addiction treatment side of the facility, which would be run separately from the work-release program.
“I cannot express enough appreciation for what the Commissioners and the [Howard County] Council have done [supporting plans for the work-release facility],” Tetrault said.
Howard County’s Opioid Overdose Task Force – which comprises more than 50 community leaders, criminal justice personnel, treatment experts and educators – also recommended equipping criminal justice staff with Narcan, a drug that can reverse the life-threatening effects of a opioid overdose.
In October, the Howard County Commissioners approved spending $5,000 on Narcan to be administered by sheriff deputies, jail staff, community corrections, the probation department, courthouse security and Kokomo police. One dose of Narcan costs about $40.
Menges wanted to do more to address Howard County’s drug problem after learning that there had been 25 overdose deaths in the county from January to July; in the past, Howard County saw about 20 overdose deaths in a full year. The “Kokomo Help Team” Facebook group also rallied thousands of people to increase awareness of addiction and mental illness locally.
“The death toll is simply unacceptable,” Menges said. “We’ve been working on addiction issues for a long time. But the problem with the opioid addiction is it will kill you.”