Alcohol & Substance Abuse

After a one-vehicle incident in downtown Juneau, police say the driver blew a blood-alcohol content three times the legal limit early Monday and was arrested.

Tautar Pearce, 37, was arrested on a charge of driving while intoxicated.

Pearce was driving a 2015 Chrysler outbound in the 400 block of Egan Drive when he struck the sidewalk on the right side of the road, according to a Juneau Police Department bulletin.

Juneau police Public Safety Manager Erann Kalwara said the incident occurred in the area of Gold Creek Bridge, behind Foodland IGA.

The car went over the sidewalk and struck the guard rail, she said.

A driver-side tire was broken off “at the axle” in the incident, Kalwara said.

The vehicle sustained about $4,900 in damage, according to bulletin. Kalwara said it did not appear that any other property was damaged.

The vehicle was impounded.

Pearce was taken to Lemon Creek Correctional Center.

Gov. Bill Walker announced Tuesday that Juneau private attorney Kirsten Swanson will be the new Juneau District Court judge.

Ten people had applied to replace Judge Keith

Levy, who’s retiring at the end of October.

The district court’s jurisdiction includes municipal ordinances, misdemeanor crimes, underage alcohol and tobacco violations, and civil cases when less than $100,000 is at stake.

According to Swanson’s application materials, she is a former U.S. Army captain and judge advocate general officer.

She’s lived in Juneau for 17 years and practiced law for 20. She said she’s gone to trial 60 times.

Her legal website says she specializes in fish and game violations, federal Lacey Act cases, and federal conspiracy and military cases.

Swanson could not be reached for comment, but in her application, she wrote she’s a big supporter of the therapeutic and mental health courts, which offer treatment-based alternatives to incarceration.

“Many people who appear in District Court are chronic alcoholics, drug addicted, mentally ill and homeless,” she wrote. “These populations have additional issues that are difficult for the court to address. I am open to looking at possible new ways to address some of these issues.”

In addition to her private practice, she’s worked in the state Public Defender’s Office and in the Department of Law on natural resources cases.

While she was in law school, she worked in an Oregon correctional facility booking prisoners.

In a news release, Gov. Walker said Swanson’s vast experience as a public and private lawyer will serve Southeast Alaska well.

District court judges in Juneau earn salary of $165,852.

The city of Bethel has had some trouble collecting taxes in recent months, but one tax they’re not having trouble collecting is the 12% sales tax from alcohol.  Since the city sold its first legal alcohol in April, Bethel has collected over a quarter of a million dollars from Bethel’s two alcohol vendors. A third vendor recently opened but those numbers were not included. .

At 5 p.m. you can see people stopping at the city’s new liquor store on their way home to pick up a six pack or bottle wine. Each purchase includes a bit to pay alcohol taxes to the city.

AC Quick Stop, which opened in May, paid $271,652 to the city in alcohol taxes. That means the store sold about $2.5 million from sales before taxes. The city is well on its way to meeting and possibly exceeding former Bethel City Manager Anne Capela’s estimated alcohol tax revenue of about half a million per year. She made that prediction based on the amount that the city brings in from cigarette sales tax.

Though most of the alcohol sales took place at the AC Quickstop liquor store, Fili’s Pizza paid the city $5,606 which means they made about $47,000 before taxes.

The city’s tax revenue reveals that the two vendors combined made almost $2.4 million since the first beer was sold on April 8, 2016.

But is it worth it? In other words — does the money the city makes from alcohol taxes help… more than it hurts by increasing the rate of alcohol-fueled crime? District Attorney for Bethel, Michael Gray, thinks it does help because he hasn’t seen any increase in crime, at least in Bethel.

“We were really expecting to see a real significant uptick. And so far, in terms of the cases referred to us, we just haven’t seen it,” Gray said.

The Association of Village Council Presidents recently passed a resolution condemning the effect of alcohol sales on the villages. Gray says the villages are another matter that’s difficult to measure, though he suspects legal sales may have caused an increase there.

“In August and September, we were noticing a significant uptick in the referrals for sexual assaults in the river villages. I can’t say that that’s related but I certainly suspect that it may be,” Gray said.

Gray says the additional revenue should be used to help Bethel’s police department.

“For years they’ve been understaffed, they have a hard time. Bethel’s a hard town to recruit people to come and live in.” Gray said.

Though Gray doesn’t explicitly support a liquor store, he thinks the income will make a positive difference if it’s used for law enforcement.

Representatives of the Alaska Federation of Natives and the National Congress of American Indians met Wednesday in Fairbanks to discuss a range of topics, including opioid and heroin addiction in rural Alaska.

Alaska State Trooper Sgt. Kevin Blanchette with the western Alaska Drug Enforcement unit was among several presenters on the issue.

Blanchette said prescription pain killers and heroin have become a top priority for the unit.

“Right now, the opioid addiction problem is just as prevalent as the alcohol use and abuse problem,” Blanchette said. “And what we’re seeing now is a lot of these are overlapping. A lot of people are prescribed these medications.”

“They’re not only drinking an excess amounts of alcohol every day,” he said. “They also take in an excess amount of pain pills. And when you fix this high level of alcohol with these opiates, you have a very real chance of death or overdose.”

Addiction to prescription pain killers often leads to heroin use.

This summer, an especially potent batch of heroin that caused several overdoses and a death in the village of Quinhagah resulted in a village dealer turning himself in, Blanchette said.

”The people, let’s say in Quinhagak or in Bethel who are maybe low level dealers, what needs to happen to get the ball rolling in their treatment is sometimes an arrest or to be charged with crimes,” Blanchette said.

Drug interdiction efforts generally focus on opioids coming into Alaska from outside and through hub communities, but Blanchette highlights the need for information from village residents to help piece together the drug trafficking puzzle.

He also points to a new public outreach effort in villages to educate kids about the dangers of opioids.

“And if we can get the message to them, so they grew up to not be users and the medical field can change their practices, maybe we can stop this new generation from becoming addicted to this drug,” Blanchette said.

Dr. Joshua Sonkiss, medical director at Fairbanks Community Mental Health said opioids were increasingly prescribed in recent decades as regulations required more aggressive treatment of pain.

Over-prescribing resulted in the current addiction problem, he said.

Dillingham police are asking the public for help in locating Michael Kohler, 28, who is wanted on numerous warrants, mainly for theft and forgery.

Kohler was released from jail to Jake’s Place on Oct. 7 for drug abuse treatment, Dillingham Police Department said.

On Oct. 12, during a field trip to the Alano Club, Kohler walked off and reportedly took the Jake’s Place van keys, facility keys, two ATM cards and a cellphone from residents’ property left in the van.

While he was in jail, police interviewed him about several other cases.

In one case, “a man reported that Kohler stayed at his residence and stole two checks from him,” Police Chief Dan Pasquariello described those in an email. “The checks had been forged and a total of $500 was stolen from the man’s account. Kohler admitted to forging the checks, and then having other persons cash the checks for him, giving him the money.”

He’s facing forgery and theft charges in that case.

Another person reported to police that “Kohler had stolen his ATM card and made numerous withdraws from his bank account, totaling $680.98,” Pasquariello said. “Kohler admitted taking the man’s ATM and making the withdraws.”

A third case involved a forged check as well.

“A man reported that Kohler had asked him to cash a check from the Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust, but the bank refused to cash the check,” Pasquariello said. “The check had been stolen in the Aleknagik Building burglary on September 30, 2016. Kohler admitted forging and asking the man to cash the check. He stated that he had found the check inside of a Delta Western truck, and denied being involved in the burglary.”

The thievery is tied to drug use, Pasquariello said.

Anyone with information about Michael Kohler’s whereabouts is asked to call Dillingham police at 842-5354.

A year ago, Anchorage was facing a public health emergency from the synthetic drug known as Spice. From July until November in 2015, ambulances were bringing an average of seven patients to area hospitals every day.

A new paper published by the Centers for Disease Control looks at what happened, and why the spice outbreak has now largely petered out.

Yuri Springer works for the state’s Department of Public Health studying patterns of disease and is the paper’s lead author. And because Spice hit Anchorage so hard and fast last summer, responders adopted the kind of coordinated response you’d see in a similar public health emergency.

In his office, Springer pointed to a chart showing medical transports for people who used Spice. At first, there’s almost nothing– zero, one, or two ambulance trips a day. Then suddenly the columns jolt upwards.

“We hit the middle of July 2015, and we saw this large spike in the number of transports, sometimes exceeding 20 or 25 ambulance transports a day for Spice-related illness,” Springer said.

“During July 15, 2015-March 15, 2016,” the authors write, “a total of 1,351 ambulance transports to Anchorage emergency departments for adverse (synthetic cannabinoid) reactions were identified.”

The numbers begin edging downward in mid-November after the municipality passed an ordinance that increased the criminal penalties for possession, sale, and use of spice. For months afterward the tally of emergency medical transports slides gradually downward. Nowadays it’s back around the original baseline.

The ordinance came through the mayor’s administration and assembly and was intended to give law enforcement more tools for going after manufacturers and dealers. Researchers say that’s a large part of what led to the drug’s decline in Anchorage. Another piece was educational outreach and collaboration between healthcare providers, social services, and city officials. According to Springer, this paper is intended partly as a template for a successful intervention.

“The point here is to disseminate the findings of the investigation so that folks in other jurisdictions who might encounter similar problems get a sense of what we faced and how we dealt with the challenges,” he said.

The study draws on a collage of evidence to give an account of the significant toll Spice was taking on users, city resources, and the local healthcare system.

During the eight-month period researchers looked at, ending in March of 2016, spice accounted for 10 percent of the city’s ambulance transports — which was not only expensive but tied up emergency response units already spread thin. During one particularly intense ten week period, 34 percent of emergency department visits were Spice-related.

The overwhelming majority of those transported, 81 percent were men. The median age was 34-years-old. And some people were brought to emergency rooms with disproportionate frequency: one pocket of 17 people was picked up by ambulances ten or more times, making up 20 percent of the overall transports.

The researchers also looked at 167 hospital charts, which offered more detailed personal and medical information about what was happening. A significant number of the spice cases involved drastic medical interventions like intubation or admission to an intensive care unit.

Many of the users reported that they were homeless, about 40 percent. But such information is tricky to verify, and researchers believe that number may be higher. 71 percent of the emergency transports began in an area of downtown “known to be a hub for the local homeless population,” the report states.

Among the study’s various methodological limitations, a significant number of the medical transports were the Alaska Native Medical Center, which didn’t make any patient charts available to researchers.

Though anecdotes abound, the authors write that this is the first such study to demonstrate with evidence a Spice outbreak disproportionately hitting homeless residents.

Researchers also found 11 chemical substances in the product and paraphernalia they were able to test. Meaning people who were using a drug purported to be synthetically replicate a high similar to marijuana were, in fact, ingesting chemicals few people know much about or understand.

And though it’s hard to prove, state investigators believe this class of drugs caused four people’s deaths in the municipality during the period under review.

“The cause of death was likely attributable to Spice use, and so that’s pretty significant,” Springer said. “That’s four people…who, in the Medical Examiner’s opinion, died in large part or entirely because of their consumption of spice.”

The paper, titled “Increase in Adverse Reactions Associated with Use of Synthetic Cannabinoids — Anchorage, Alaska 2015-2016,” appears in the October 14th issue of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.