Alcohol & Substance Abuse

Between the two open blades of a pair of scissors stretches a thick red ribbon across the hallway of the new Yukon-Kuskokwim Ayagnirvik Healing Center. Holding the scissors are Gloria Simeon, YKHC Board vice chair, and James Charlie Sr., honorary board member.

The ribbon falls in half with one cut, and the two ends flutter to the new wooden floor of the approximately $12.8 million facility as the crowd applauds and cheers. At one end of the hallway are 16 beds for inpatient alcohol treatment as well as an exercise room, craft rooms, and a kitchen. Down the other end are rooms for outpatient counseling for both alcohol and opioid addiction.

People in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta seeking treatment for alcohol addiction now have a newer, more spacious facility to help them. And with the new building, there is renewed hope for treating a disease that has long affected many lives in the region. The Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation celebrated the opening of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Ayagnirvik Healing Center on Wednesday.

In the middle sits a small gym with a single basketball hoop. Here, dozens of community members and YKHC board members and employees are gathering to commemorate the building’s opening.

Honorary Board Member James Charlie Sr. begins the ceremony with a prayer of thanksgiving.

“Quyana for this opportunity to get together to open this building,” he prayed, “which will help our people who need help in getting rid of alcoholism or other drugs.”

Gratitude and hope for a better future echoes throughout the morning’s speeches. Board members thank those who first began offering alcohol treatment in Bethel in the 1970s. Administrators thank the funders and construction workers who made the building possible. Ray Watson, Director of the Healing Center, thanks the employees filling the room, who every day guide patients toward recovery.

“I always say,” Watson told the crowd, “I have a deep respect for those kind of people who choose this kind of work because it takes a lot of humility and love towards their fellow human beings to help them heal.”

Watson knows this work well: first as a patient in the 1980s, then as a counselor, and now as the center’s director.

“I always say the people who enter into counseling are the lucky ones because there are so many out there who don’t have that, or at this point in time, they’re not there yet,” Watson said.

Many speakers noted that everyone in the Delta knows someone in the region who struggles with alcohol or drugs. They might even one day seek treatment themselves.

The facility actually opened six weeks ago. Watson said the patients were sent on an ‘outing’ for the ribbon cutting to protect their confidentiality. But after the ribbon is thrown away, the cake eaten, and the balloons taken out, those patients will return. They may have to come back repeatedly if they relapse.

This new center, located behind the Bethel post office, was set to open a couple years ago. But in October of 2014, the partially constructed building caught fire and burned to the ground. Construction began again.

Diane Kaplan is the President and CEO of the Rasmuson Foundation, one of the building’s funders. She said that the fire and rebuilding can be seen as a metaphor for recovery.

“People who don’t understand a lot about this disease will say, ‘Well how many people went into this facility and got sober?’ Well very often it doesn’t happen the first time,” Kaplan said. “So I think we can look at what happened to this building as there was a great effort to build it, and then something happened, and it fell down, and now it’s been picked up again. And that really is the message for people who struggle with alcohol.”

But as Director Watson said and can attest, recovery, like the new building, is possible.

Alaska State Troopers thwarted two attempts to import alcohol to the community of Elim over the weekend.

Troopers seized an estimated total of 10 liters of alcohol in Nome Sunday, Jan. 8, in two separate incidents: one, an estimated 7 liters, the other about 3 liters.

Airline passengers believed to be involved in the alcohol smuggling attempts were traveling from Nome to Elim, a local option community where alcohol sales and importation are banned.

Suspects have been identified.

The total number and names of those suspects have yet to be released, as troopers continue their investigation.

Late last month the state’s crime lab confirmed that a counterfeit prescription opioid tablet was found in Alaska.

The small blue pill looked like a generic oxycodone tablet but was actually made of the much stronger drug fentanyl.

This is the first such pill found in the state, but they’ve been circulating in the Lower 48 for more than a year.

People who buy drugs illegally may not be aware they are getting such a powerful opioid and could more easily overdose when using it, said Jay Butler, chief medical officer and director of Alaska Division of Public Health.

“In general use of illicitly obtained drugs is always going to be a game of Russian roulette,” Butler said.

People should seek treatment for their addictions, Butler advised, but if treatment isn’t available they should exercise caution with illegal drugs.

“Never use any kind of opioid medication alone,” Butler said. “Always have someone around who can help you if you overdose. Have Naloxone available. That’s the drug that can reverse the respiratory depression from opioid overdose. And avoid mixing drugs.”

“Many people who die of an overdose have multiple drugs and alcohol on board at the time of death,” he said.

The state plans to start distributing Naloxone to law enforcement agencies and health workers next week, Butler said.

The medication can be injected or administered through a nasal spray.

The rate of suicide and homicide in the Kusilvak Census Area, located along the lower Yukon River, more than doubled since 1980, a rate increase higher than anywhere else in the nation.

A study from the University of Washington mapped how people in the U.S. died during those years. Its finding for the area is disturbing.

Charlie Oen’s battle with addiction started when he was 16 and his family moved to Lima, Ohio. It was the last stop in a string of moves his military family made — from Panama to North Carolina, Kentucky, Texas and Germany.

“I went toward a bad group because those were the people that accepted me,” he says. Drugs became a substitute for real friendships.

He started drinking, popping pills, cooking meth and shooting heroin. He was homeless for a while when his parents kicked him out of the house. “I would just be wandering the streets of Lima at all hours of the night until I found somewhere, chilled, sat down, fell asleep in an alley,” he says.

By age 19, Charlie was serving a three-year sentence in prison on a burglary charge. That’s where he stopped using drugs. He spent the last five months of his sentence in a community-based correctional facility where he took classes and completed group work to learn about addiction. The lessons stuck.

“I started telling people, ‘I want to be a probation officer,’ and everybody knocked it,” he says. “They were like, ‘You can’t do that, you’re a felon.’ I said, ‘Check it out, I’m going to do something.’ ”

One year later, he started working as a peer recovery coach, using his own experiences to help other people stay in recovery.

Charlie is one of five peer recovery coaches at Coleman Professional Services in Lima, and at age 25, he is by far the youngest. Each coach works with about 20 clients to help remove some of the impediments, big and small, to living a drug-free life. Some clients may need help learning to socialize without drugs or getting a ride to their recovery meetings. Others, like 52-year-old Anna Hershey, need more constant support.

“I texted you last night. I know it was late but I needed someone to talk to right away,” she tells Charlie when they meet in Coleman’s parking lot the week before Thanksgiving. She’d argued with her boyfriend the night before, and anger is usually a trigger for her drug use. Charlie is her first recovery coach in over 30 years of addiction.

“I’m proud of myself because I didn’t leave the house and go do the drugs, and that’s what I usually do when I get frustrated,” she tells him.

Over the course of their 90-minute appointment, Charlie takes Anna to two food banks to pick up donated groceries, and then to check on her application to ring a bell for the Salvation Army this winter. It’s been approved, and despite the previous night’s quarrel, she’s excited to share that news with her boyfriend when Charlie drops her off at home.

Some days Charlie meets with as many as five clients. Today it’s just two: Anna and Shelly Cavinder.

“It’s not been a great day,” Shelly tells Charlie as she gets in his car. She was written up twice in the morning at the women’s shelter where she’s living, which puts her on thin ice for the final two weeks of her stay. She’s moving into a new apartment and bought furniture in anticipation — but the unit where she’s storing the furniture got infested with cockroaches, and today, Charlie is helping her throw it all away.

Shelly is 50. She’s been using drugs since before Charlie was born. Still, she calls him her lifesaver. “If I didn’t have Charlie, I would probably be back on drugs and dead,” she says. “He even talks to me on his days off, you know, after hours when I have an issue.”

“I appreciate that Shelly,” Charlie says. She smiles and pats his leg.

“You’re welcome,” she replies.

The little pick-me-ups and attagirls Charlie gives Shelly every day go a long way to keeping her from becoming a statistic. There were 52,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2015, 18 of them in this small Ohio county alone. Addiction is a tough disease to beat and relapse rates are high.

It can be easy to forget sometimes that Charlie has his own history with addiction, one he still deals with to this day. His first job out of prison was making salads at the Texas Roadhouse. He left the job when he was hired as a peer recovery coach two years ago.

He wants to continue working in the recovery field and plans on going to school to get a social work degree. But last year he started working three nights a week again at the Texas Roadhouse to help pay off his court fees, something he has to do before he can start taking classes. He’s got $2,900 to go, down from $10,000. “This is what I do to get the judicial system off my back,” he says.

After everything is paid off, he says he’ll keep working two jobs for a while, “to build the bank back up a little.”

Every day he makes a point to do something for himself — he’s in recovery, too, so focusing on self-care can be just as important as caring for his clients. Lately he’s been playing soccer at a park near his house, sometimes with friends, other times alone. “Early in the morning there’ll be no cars driving,” he says. “All you hear is your feet and the grass and the ball flying through the sky. It feels good.”

Charlie is five years clean, three years out of prison and has spent more than two years as a peer recovery coach. He has a lot of life to live. But, he says, “When people ask, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’ I’ve never had an answer. Because three years ago I didn’t think I’d be having this interview today.”

“So just as long as I continuously do what I’ve got to do and stay positive, stay out of the way and continue to want to strive, something will come my way. The doors will open.”

Meredith Rizzo, Carmel Wroth, Nancy Shute, Gisele Grayson and Diane Webber edited this story, which is part of a reporting partnership with NPR, Side Effects Public Media and Kaiser Health News.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Three businesses are vying for Bethel’s final liquor store license.

One business has already submitted its application, and the other two are in the three-week public notice period required before applying.

If the other two get their applications in on time, it’ll be up to the Alaska Alcoholic Beverage Control Board to decide which of the three businesses holds the final license.

But how will they choose?

The Players: The three competitors are Kusko Liquor, which would replace Cezary’s Auto Body and Paint; the main Alaska Commercial Company store; and Bethel Liquor Store LLC, which would replace Fili’s Pizza restaurant.

The Limit: Bethel is limited to just three liquor store licenses because of its population size. State law sets a limit of one license per 3,000 people or a portion of that, so Bethel gets three.

The Deadline: The two businesses in the public notice phase have to submit their applications by the second weekend of January in order to compete with the already submitted application. That’s because only applications submitted within the same 30 days are considered competing. The clock started ticking on December 16 when Kusko Liquor submitted its application first.

If all the applications are received before the second weekend of January, the board will decide on one applicant at its next meeting using some of the following criteria:

If an application doesn’t meet all state and local requirements, then it’s out.

If an application is protested by its local government and the board approves the protest, then it’s out.

If the board determines any application isn’t in the public’s interest, then that one’s out. The factors for considering public interest are safety, suitability, size of the premises, proximity to other licensed premises, and community amenities associated with the premises like entertainment, dining, and tourism. The local governing body can also add its preferences and priorities to this list.

If there are still competing applications after these factors have been considered, the board will resort to a drawing, essentially pulling a name out of a hat and declaring it the winner. Any loser has a right to appeal.

The board next meets in February 2017.