Tackling Snohomish County’s heroin epidemic requires funding that doesn’t exist

If you’re a heroin addict in Snohomish County and you want help, chances are you’ll be moved out of the county — or even state. That could change soon.

It’s a sign that there could be hope in the opioid crisis after all. The sheriff and numerous county and city agencies believe they’ve identified buildings that could house emergency social services.

As it stands now, Snohomish County has just 16 detox beds for a population of 780,000. But it’s not Snohomish County’s fault. There is an old federal rule called the Institution of Mental Disease that says Medicaid money will not pay for institutions. Institutions are defined as anything over 17 beds.

Why don’t they open more 16-bed facilities, you ask? Try finding a neighborhood that wants a detox center. It took Snohomish County four years to nail down Lynnwood as the site for its second 16-bed detox facility, which will open this summer.

Even 32 beds doesn’t even begin to match the need. It also doesn’t address the lack of treatment centers that typically come after detox (either inpatient or outpatient). For that, Snohomish County has one and it’s only for pregnant or parenting women. If a person is lucky enough to be able to pay for or get funding for treatment, they’ll likely be shipped to a different Washington county or out-of-state.

Why doesn’t the county open more treatment centers? There’s no money. The sales tax increase that would have funneled money into law enforcement and addiction services failed last August by 348 votes.

There isn’t much hope on the horizon, either. Most drugs enjoy a popularity surge before dropping off to make way for the next high du-jour, but Snohomish County health officials say heroin isn’t letting up.

“What’s unique with heroin is that we’re not seeing it decline. We see heroin is continuing to rise and we’re also seeing meth coming back again,” Cammy Hart-Anderson said.

Hart-Anderson has worked for Snohomish County for 28 years. Currently, she runs the veterans program and works in Behavioral Health Services (including substance abuse). As she puts, it there’s “never a dull day.”

“I think part of it is that people that are using heroin and drugs in general are, for lack of a better term, sicker than they were before and so now [use] pretty much anything [they] can get [their] hands on. I want to come up, I want to come down, I’m trying to find a way to feel normal,” Hart-Anderson explained.

The only way to do that is to get sober. But how? That’s where the partnerships among county, agencies, and the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Department comes in.

The agencies come together regularly and have recently identified a couple of spaces that can be presupposed for the purposes of combating the heroin crisis. Because, as Sheriff Ty Trenary puts it, you can’t jail your way out of this epidemic.

“The solution that I’m frustrated with is this building across the street called the Snohomish County Jail. It’s the largest detox/mental health facility in Snohomish County but for the fact that it was not designed to do either one of those functions,” Trenary said.

But what can act in that capacity are two empty floors in the jail that used to house the work release program. The program was cut to save $1.3 million a year and has sat vacant since.

“It would provide us bed space for short-term housing, would provide us intervention ability and when either people are proactively or contacted by our outreach programs, or when people are arrested for non-violent misdemeanor crimes for which addiction and mental health are the driving factors, we now have programs that treat that — things that are upstream — to prevent them from being part of the revolving door,” Trenary said.

Despite still trying to find adequate funding for this plan, Trenary says this is happening.

Also an option: Re-purposing the Juvenile Detention Center. Hart-Anderson says it was designed to hold up to 130 children, but changes in how they approach arresting and treating juveniles means it sits mostly empty.

“The facility now has anywhere from 10 to 20 kids in it at any time so there’s a lot of vacant space. And so now we’ve got vacant space that the county owns and the county pays to maintain and we’ve got this public need,” Hart-Anderson said.

An architect is drawing up plans to turn the detention center into a facility that can change with the need: a detox center one day and emergency housing the next.

All of this sounds great and makes it sound like the county is making progress on solving the heroin epidemic, but at what cost? The sales tax last summer failed, the state has no budget plan because Olympia’s running into its second special session and it’s not like local governments are flush with money.

Despite all that, Hart-Anderson says the Snohomish delegation in Olympia “gets it” and has pledged capital money for these projects. It’s just a wait-and-see situation because of the special session.

Sheriff Trenary says he’ll get this done with the budget he’s been given. But the sales tax will come up again.

“My hope going forward is that we’ll have a strong conversation with our taxpayers, we’ll have a conversation about what our priorities are in government here and we’ll make progress. To ignore it means five years from now, in my opinion, it’ll be much worse,” Trenary said.

Last year in Snohomish County, 94 people died from a prescription or heroin overdose. The sheriff’s department saved 70 lives with naloxone, a prescription overdose-reversal drug sold under the name Narcan, that has seen a price hike since the opioid epidemic gained attention.

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