COVID-19 has sent many people on the Peninsula into relative isolation, but one group of people is still going out plenty: dealers with heroin and other opioids.
That has the substance abuse treatment team at Hampton-Newport News Community Services Board worried.
“These are trying times and with mental health and anxiety on top of that we’re seeing relapses and overdoses,” said Shelby Spencer-Jones, a project manager with the board’s addiction and recovery treatment division.
The stress of worrying about the virus, about family members who may be vulnerable and, for many, about lost jobs or furloughs makes drugs that much harder to resist, she said.
Staying home means missing out on support groups, and many basic day-to-day rituals of recovery —sometimes as simple as repeating a creed or a formal promise to yourself — that can make a difference on the road to recovery, Spencer-Jones said. It can mean missing out on accountability, too, said clinical services administrator James Strickland.
Many of the people he and Spencer-Jones want to help assume the CSB’s doors are closed, and that services aren’t available. That’s not true. There’s also help to go to them, in case transportation is hard to arrange.
One particularly critical outreach — meeting emergency room patients after an overdose — remains hard to arrange because of concerns about keeping the virus from spreading, Spencer-Jones said.
But the two medication assisted programs the two CSB officials manage are open for business. Outpatient services along with crisis response staff, and on-line and telephone links to peer support specialists are all running and ready to help. So is the CSB’s unusual residential program for pregnant women and new mothers recovering from addiction.
Spencer-Jones and Strickland manage grant programs meant to connect people who have no insurance with services and to sign them up with Medicaid so that they get the kind of long term support that recovery from addiction often requires.
To get the word out, the CSB is teaming up with Peninsula Community Opioid Response, a group of public and private agencies working to form a partnership between law enforcement, criminal justice, health care and government agencies to tackle the opioid epidemic with a webinar to let the community know the resources available.
You can register for the webinar here: https://unitedwayvirginiapeninsula.wufoo.com/forms/xc8qpka1gfbzpg/
Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com
