Ivory Mack sits at her desk at Bean’s Cafe. She says a change in food-stamp rules could help recovering addicts. (Photo by Anne Hillman/KSKA)
People with drug felonies can now apply for food stamps in Alaska.
With the signing of Senate Bill 91, the state’s criminal justice reform bill, the state partially opted-out of the 1996 federally-imposed lifetime ban. Individuals can now apply, but they have to prove that they are complying with parole and substance abuse treatment requirements.
Sixty-one year-old Ivory Mack committed a drug felony nearly 20 years ago. These days, she is working at Bean’s Cafe, a soup kitchen in downtown Anchorage. Standing in a small office, she handed out vitamins and socks through a half-open door.
“Your uncle?” she asked one of the clients as he looked through a box of socks. “What about your uncle? He need a pair, too? Well, take two pair.”
She used to be on the other side of that door. Mack said she spent about six years hanging out at Bean’s and the Brother Francis Shelter when she was fighting a nearly four-decade-long drug addiction.
“Started as a kid taking speed,” she said. “No one wants to be fat, you know. So I was on that. Body image. I was anorexic, I went through it all.”
Eventually she started using harder drugs because she wanted to fit in, “Everyone was doing it.”
Then, about 20 years ago, “police busted me for having drugs on me. I went to jail, did my little time, came out, and I couldn’t eat because they wouldn’t give me food stamps because I was a drug-related felon.”
She said she was homeless, vulnerable, and didn’t have anywhere to turn. And she was angry.
“You know, people can go kill people, rape kids — and eat. Have a few drugs on you, you have to go hungry? It’s ridiculous.”
The ban was part of President Bill Clinton’s War on Drugs and quickly passed Congress. Anyone convicted of a state or federal drug felony after Aug. 22, 1996, would have a lifetime ban on receiving food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. States could opt out of the ban and most already have.
Now, that ban has been partially lifted in Alaska. People with drug felonies can apply for the program, but they have to prove that they are complying with parole requirements and substance abuse treatment plans.
That’s sometimes easier said than done, said Cara Durr with the Food Bank of Alaska. “You know if this is something that’s happened 10 or 15 years ago, it’s not going to be as easy as someone who has just been released.” It’s also harder for people who have felonies out of state.
Durr said the Food Bank will work with people to help them provide the necessary proof because food assistance can help them become more stable and reduce recidivism.
“People who are coming out of incarceration are often some of the most vulnerable people,” she said. “They’re just trying to get back on their feet. And if we’re withholding food assistance from them, it’s not helping them to really do that.”
It’s unclear how many people in Alaska will be affected by the change in the law because people come and go from the state, but nearly 175 people with state and federal drug felonies have been released from prison in Alaska so far this year and can now apply.
According to the Marshall Project, only four states still have complete bans in place: Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming. Georgia partially lifted the ban there earlier this year.
For Ivory Mack, it was too late for the change to help her. She said she would only receive about $20 a month and with adverse health conditions, it would be hard for her to get to the public assistance office and complete the interview to apply. So she is getting by on her modest income and a couple of meals from Bean’s while she’s down there working.
It feels good to be giving back to the place that helped her make it through, Mack said. “I like it because I get to see people, and I feel like I’m a good example to them. If I can do it, anyone can do it.”
Mack said she’s been clean for three years now, and she’s hoping access to food stamps can help some of her friends get clean, too.
An old city sign sits on the edge of Hugo, Colo., in 2011. Officials have lifted an advisory it had instituted after tests revealed the presence of THC in the town’s water supply. Further tests have turned out negative. Ed Andrieski/AP
Join me, if you will, on a brief trip down memory lane — back to Wednesday, when authorities told residents of a small Colorado town that their tap water had been laced with THC. At the time, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office said that multiple tests of a local well had turned up “presumptive positive” for the compound, best known as the mind-altering component in marijuana.
Officials warned the some 700 residents of Hugo, Colo., to avoid drinking, cooking with or bathing in the local water supply — but Capt. Michael Yowell was also careful to add a caveat: “Any number of substances could cause a false positive,” he said at a Wednesday press conference. “That is being investigated.”
Now, that disclaimer appears to have been prudent.
On Saturday morning, the sheriff’s office announced that scientists with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation have determined that the samples were, in fact, negative for THC. “Based upon the conclusive results now known to us,” the office tweeted, “it is believed that there never was THC in the water system.”
#HugosWater CBI Scientists have concluded water samples are NEG for THC. Believed that test kit were false +. Water advisory is cancelled!!!
— Lincoln County S.O. (@LincolnCountySO) July 23, 2016
Officials expanded on the announcement in a Facebook post, saying, in part, “We are happy to report that the WATER ADVISORY is cancelled immediately. Please resume any and all water activities.”
As NPR’s Camila Domonoske reported earlier this week, it’s unclear that the THC would have had any significant effect on residents, even if it had been present in the water supply.
“In general, THC is relatively insoluble in water, which is why marijuana products usually rely on oil or alcohol to extract cannabinoids,” Camila said. As she noted, Joseph Evans, a former EPA scientist, told The Denver Post, “I can’t imagine, I can’t even fathom the idea that THC would be in water at any type of solubility to create any kind of health hazard.”
Now that the advisory has been lifted, one question is still nagging at this happy ending: The well that caused the trouble in the first place showed “signs of tampering,” according to Yowell. A criminal investigation into the matter remains ongoing.
In the meantime, residents are welcome to get back in the water — or leave it in disappointment, as the case may be.
Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
It’s a common scenario: Someone checks into a hospital for surgery or an illness and leaves with a prescription for an opioid painkiller, opening the door to long-term use and dependence. A recent study examined this pattern and found the prescriptions are used and renewed more often than you might imagine.
Researchers analyzed the pharmacy claims of a random sample of more than 623,000 Medicare beneficiaries who were hospitalized in 2011. They only included people who did not have a prescription claim for opioids for at least 60 days before being hospitalized.
The results, first published online in JAMA Internal Medicine in June, showed that 14.9 percent of the hospitalized beneficiaries filled a prescription for an opioid within a week after being discharged. Of those who filled the first prescription, 42.5 percent had another pharmacy claim for an opioid painkiller at least 90 days later.
“Presumably they were prescribed it and continued on it because of some sort of chronic pain,” said Dr. Anupam Jena, associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author. Still, there are many ways to treat pain, Jena noted, and hospitals are supposed to look at other approaches.
In 2013, nearly 44,000 people died from drug overdoses, including more than 16,000 from opioid painkillers such as hydrocodone and morphine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Drug overdoses involving opioids nearly quadrupled between 1999 and 2013.
The JAMA Internal Medicine study found significant variations in the rate of new opioid use by Medicare beneficiaries across hospitals, from 10 percent on the low end to 20 percent on the high end.
In addition, hospitals that were ranked higher by patients for inpatient pain control had modestly higher rates of opioid use after discharge.
“For patients who are similar across a broad range of characteristics … there appears to be a large range in the propensity of hospitals to prescribe opioids,” Jena said. “The variation is alarming because it means some hospitals are doing it too much and some too little.” More research is needed to determine what the appropriate opioid prescribing standards should be, he said.
Please contact Kaiser Health News to send comments or ideas for future topics for the Insuring Your Health column.
KHN’s coverage of aging and long term care issues is supported in part by a grant from The SCAN Foundation.
A woman lobbying Congress holds two versions of naloxone which can be used to reverse an opioid overdose. (Photo by Al Drago/CQ-Roll Call Inc.)
The Senate is set to approve a bill intended to change the way police and health care workers treat people struggling with opioid addictions.
The bill is an amalgam of more than a dozen proposals passed through the year in the House and Senate. And while it has lots of new policies and provisions — from creating a task force to study how best to treat pain, to encouraging states to create prescription drug monitoring programs — it doesn’t have much money to put them in place.
President Obama had requested $1.1 billion to help pay for more addiction treatment programs and other initiatives. But the version agreed to by House and Senate Republicans last week didn’t include all that money. In the end, it will probably get about half that much.
“It’s clear that efforts to prevent and treat the opioid epidemic will fall short without additional investments,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, said in a statement after House and Senate negotiators hammered out the final bill.
But Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., argued that the money for treatment has been rising for three years.
“Our friends on the other side say, you have to fund it. We are funding it,” he said in a statement on the Senate floor Friday. “And they helped fund it. We’ve increased funding for opioids already by 542 percent.”
Still, Democrats are expected to support the bill even without the additional money.
And that’s a good thing, says Linda Rosenberg, president of the National Council for Behavioral Health, because the bill helps expand treatment in significant ways.
For example, it allows nurses and physician assistants to treat people with addictions using medications, which is considered the evidence-based standard.
“Treatment capacity is really a crisis. There just isn’t enough,” Rosenberg tells Shots. “But what this bill does to address that — it expands the kinds of people who can prescribe medications for addictions. And that’s a very big deal.”
She says that provision alone can help because nonprofit treatment centers will be able to use nurse practitioners and physician assistants rather than trying to hire doctors, who are both scarce and expensive.
The bill also allows the Department of Health and Human Services to give grants to states and community organizations for improving or expanding treatment and recovery programs. It has several provisions that would allow police departments to send people with addiction problems to treatment rather than to jail.
In one of the few areas of the bill that includes funding, lawmakers authorized the Department of Justice to spend $100 million a year for five years to find alternatives to jail for opioid abusers, and to allow prisons to use methadone or buprenorphine to treat inmates with opioid addictions.
Rosenberg says these measures help change the definition of addiction from a crime to a health problem.
“It’s a health care issue and not a moral failing issue,” she says. That’s a big reversal from the “war on drugs” campaigns of a few decades ago.
And the legislation allows more people to have access to naloxone, the drug that can reverse an opioid overdose, reducing the risk of death. Access would be expanded for people working in schools and community centers.
The bill encourage pharmacies to fill standing orders for the drug so that those likely to come in contact with someone suffering an overdose will have the drug on hand, according to Mike Kelly. He is the U.S. president of Adapt Pharma, which sells Narcan, a nasal spray version of naloxone.
“This bill addresses getting Narcan out into the community, outside of emergency and first responders,” Kelly says. “The big thing here is this will fund recovery.”
Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Juneau police Lt. David Campbell at his desk. (Photo by Quinton Chandler/KTOO)
Anytime someone breaks in somewhere to steal or commit a felony, that’s a burglary. It’s a crime of opportunity that can affect anyone, said Juneau police Lt. David Campbell.
“What I see a lot of is people who are not exposed to crime, and they live in Juneau and think it’s a little crime-free utopia, and they make it very easy for an opportunistic thief to victimize them. They don’t lock their houses. They leave their cars unlocked,” Campbell said.
Campbell sits at his office computer reviewing the history of burglary in Juneau.
JPD has seen a dramatic rise in burglaries in 2015 and, so far, this year the trend is continuing. Victims of break-ins have lost everything from inexpensive belongings to thousands of dollars in valuables. Juneau Police say drug addiction is driving part of the increase.
“So overall, in Juneau, we had basically three years of pretty solid reductions going down and then in 2015, we had a pretty sharp increase,” Campbell said.
JPD’s annual stats for 2015 show reported burglaries increased by 66 cases. It’s an increase of 64 percent.
“So then the question is, ‘OK, well why? What’s doing it,’” Campbell asked. “With burglaries you typically have either a small group of people or a small group of groups that can create a lot of burglaries at one time. In 2015 we also saw a pretty big increase in our issues dealing with people that were dealing with controlled substances.”
Campbell sees a definite correlation between heroin use and other crimes. He said addicts sometimes resort to crime to pay for their addiction.
“But, it would be inappropriate for me to say that’s the sole reason,” Campbell said.
He said JPD has also seen serial burglars, who don’t have a drug problem but repeatedly steal for other reasons. Simply put, he can’t identify every factor contributing to Juneau’s spike in burglaries, and it’s impossible to say who all the burglars are. They cross all sectors of the community.
“What I can pretty much guarantee you is that if someone is a burglar, they’re not going to burgle one place and then stop,” Campbell said.
Campbell said most burglars will continue breaking into places until they are arrested or something else stops them, so property owners need to make their properties too risky to target.
“If somebody really wants to break into your house, or your business, stopping them will be very, very difficult. But, you can make it to the point where, when that really low level cost-benefit analysis happens, the person will choose to go somewhere else as opposed to victimizing you,” he said.
He suggested property owners practice “crime prevention through environmental design.”
“How do you design places so it sends the subconscious message to people that this is not the place that you want to commit a crime in? It’s not just burglary, it could be any crime. We’re talking about natural lighting, lines of surveillance (and) things along those lines,” Campbell said.
He said JPD has posted advice for small business owners on its Facebook page. Suggestions like emptying your cash register and leaving it open and visible to people passing by the front of the store.
“If a thief walks by or a burglar walks by, they’re going to think, ‘Wow, if I go into this place, anybody on the outside is going to see me in there because there’s easy viewing access through the windows and why would I go in there? The cash register is open, there’s nothing in it,’” Campbell explained.
He said people can also try “target hardening”: installing stronger locks, and security systems.
According to JPD’s annual report the department cleared roughly 47 of the 169 burglary cases it investigated in 2015. That’s a higher clearance rate than the national average in 2014. Campbell said property crimes are generally much harder to clear, because most of the time police are dealing with people who don’t know each other.
The report also said the number of vehicle thefts and thefts in general also rose significantly in 2015.
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