Every parent of a child addicted to any substance was, I’m sure, heartsick to hear of the sudden, nearly simultaneous drug overdoses of more than 100 users over the course of two days earlier this month in New Haven, Conn., many of them on the city’s celebrated Green, which abuts the campus of Yale University.
No deaths were reported, but many of the victims were rendered nauseous, unconscious or were in respiratory distress. Dr. Kathryn Hawk, an emergency department physician at Yale-New Haven Hospital, said the federal Drug Enforcement Administration confirmed the presence of “K2,” which is a synthetic form of marijuana, and fentanyl, a powerful opioid.
In the 1970s, as a Yale Divinity School student, I worked as an intern with the chief of the New Haven Police Department, and even that long ago, New Haven’s law enforcement officers had an enlightened attitude toward addiction, seeing it as an illness, not a crime.
Chief William Farrell had me arrange after-hours, off-the-record conferences in his office with representatives of local 12-step programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, to see how the department could help people — even its own members — who were suffering from addictions to gambling and alcohol. Later, in February 1984, Farrell appeared on 60 Minutes to talk about a New Haven prostitute and heroin addict who had transmitted AIDS to her infant, the first medically acknowledged heterosexual transmission of AIDS in America. Correspondent Morley Safer asked the chief if the prostitute could be taken off the streets because of her drug addiction. Farrell replied: “We could arrest her if she was found in possession or sale of drugs. But it is not a crime to be addicted to drugs.”
The woman died of AIDS in 1985, still addicted to heroin. Until her death, she visited her child daily in the intensive care unit at Yale-New Haven hospital, where he had been a patient since his birth. He died months after his mother.
After the recent spate of overdoses, New Haven’s current chief of police, Anthony Campbell, said, “We are asking people to not come down to the Green to purchase what is K2. Clearly there is a bad batch.” This moderate statement — avoiding threats of punishment and emphasizing the reality of addiction — seems clearly in the tradition of Chief Farrell’s addiction-as-illness policy.
Can such an enlightened approach by police save the lives of drug users and addicts? The 12-step model seems helpless in the face of the worst threat: sudden death due to an overdose. The sole requirement for membership in a 12-step program is “a desire” to stop the addictive behavior, but “a desire” is of no use to a corpse.
As an English teacher (now retired) in quaint, little Vermont, I have seen four of my own students die from drug overdoses in the last dozen years. With the brains of the Yale University medical establishment, the hearts of New Haven’s religious community (including Yale’s divinity students), and the enlightenment of New Haven’s police force, surely some way out of this sad situation can emerge.
Or maybe it will be the addicts themselves who find a way out. After all, the original 12-step program was founded in 1928 by two Vermonters, both hopelessly addicted to alcohol, one a doctor and the other a businessman. Ninety years later, Alcoholics Anonymous has 10,000 weekly meetings worldwide and 2 million members. It has no dues or fees, owns no real estate, and requires no pledge of belief, just “a desire” not to be addicted.
Surely that desire is waiting to be harnessed in the more dangerous world of drug addiction, with its looming threat of overdose and sudden death.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.