Recovering Addict Reforms Police Approach To Opiates

BEREA, OH — Nicole Walmsley, 31, was nearly killed by fentanyl. She was staring down a prison sentence for felony drug possession and couldn’t convince herself she wanted to be sober anymore. So she went to her bathroom, shoved what she thought was heroin into a hypodermic needle and shot up. She knew immediately she had made a mistake that could have been deadly.

“I knew the minute I put it in my arm that it wasn’t heroin. It was fentanyl. It burned going through every vein in my body. I knew I was dying. I blacked out,” Walmsley told Patch. “There were no bright lights, no Jesus calling me, none of the stuff you think you might see when you’re dying. It was just dark and cold, and I was almost dreaming.”

After recovering from her overdose, Walmsley went to prison, detoxed and made the decision to stop using drugs. It wasn’t easy. Detoxing is a brutal process, she said.

“It’s like the flu times 10,” she said. “Detox isn’t just a physical fight, it’s a mental fight. You know there’s no way to get access to the drugs in a jail cell, so the mental part was gone for me. The physical part sucks. You get a lot of saliva. You’re drooling on yourself. You sneeze a lot. You don’t get a lot of sleep. You get restless leg syndrome. My arms would twitch and spasm. That wouldn’t go away for seven days. I still haven’t slept normally. After 30 days of living right and eating right, you start to get better physically.”

(This is part one of a two-part series. Part two discusses prescription medication’s role in the opiate crisis. You can read part two by clicking here.)

Now Walmsley is crusading for a new type of policing for addicts. She’s the Ohio liaison for the Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative (PAARI), a job she said she works 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

She believes PAARI could be part of a grassroots solution to Ohio’s harrowing, ballooning opioid problem.

The Ohio Addiction Problem

In October 2016, the Democratic staff of the Senate Finance Committee released a report that called Ohio the “face of the nation’s opioid epidemic.” Now 2017 is shaping up to be the deadliest year ever for opioid deaths in northeast Ohio.

At least 60 people died of heroin or fentanyl overdoses in February in Cuyahoga County, the county medical examiner reported. That’s the most deaths in the county from opioid overdose ever. The previous record was set in September 2016 when 57 people OD'd on heroin or fentanyl.

Fentanyl has specifically led to thousands of deaths throughout the state. In 2014, there were 503 fentanyl overdose deaths. In 2015, there were 1,155, according to the Ohio Department of Health.

And before you write off the opioid epidemic as an inner-city Cleveland problem, the narcotics have spread across suburban streets and decimated families. New Strongsville Police Chief Mark Fender told Patch curbing the spread of drugs in his city is one of his main priorities. Lakewood Mayor Michael Summers has spoken extensively about the need for more creative action to solve the epidemic.

The state’s response to the epidemic has partly been focused on prevention, a tactic Walmsley mostly agrees is the right approach. She believes proper narcotics safety education needs to be offered as early as middle school. Her own daughter came home one day and said, “I’m glad you’re not doing narcotics,” Walmsley said.

But what the girl knows about narcotics didn’t come from the classroom. She picked it up from a television show.

“DARE sucks. DARE did show me videos of drinking and driving and what happens if you drink and drive. I never did drink and drive. I may have shot up heroin, but I never drank and drove. They need to change their curriculum. They need to bring in addicts who can relate to students and bring real stories of addiction,” Walmsley said.

Ohio has launched the Start Talking! program specifically to target at-risk youth and open lines of communication on drug use. Walmsley thinks it is a good start, but more should be done to target youth. Ohio has also broadened its awareness campaign to provide more information to the public at large.

Helping existing addicts though, Walmsley thinks, must be done at a grassroots level to be successful.

Police Care

Berea is one of the most recent police departments in Cuyahoga County to adopt a PAARI-style program. Launched in the second half of 2016, the Berea program is called Safe Passages. While still associated with the national PAARI organization, Safe Passages has now expanded some of its outreach efforts.

“It’s a public health crisis,” Berea Police Sgt. Patrick Greenhill told Patch. “We’re very familiar with the problems of heroin and opioids. We want to come at it in more of a service aspect.”

Effectively, the PAARI programs are designed to help addicts instead of arrest them. Too often, Walmsley said, addicts are arrested and then dumped back on the street. No effort is made to help them navigate their re-entry into society, and no effort is made to help them address the issues that caused them to shoot up in the first place.

Greenhill is careful to note that PAARI is not an amnesty program.

Berea Police wanted a PAARI program because it had seen firsthand the many problems addiction brings to a community. It’s never as simple as one person abusing narcotics, Greenhill said. Those addicts need to feed their habit, so they frequently begin stealing from family members, breaking into friends’ houses and doing everything they can to get money to feed their addiction.

The addicts who turn themselves into a police department are desperate.

“The people coming to us are coming to us voluntarily. They are tired. They do not want to live in addiction anymore,” he said. “They are looking for help, they don’t have the energy, the resources, the whatever to get the help they need. We facilitate getting them into detox and treatment.”

Greenhill said helping just one addict recover means helping an entire network of people, including an addict’s friends and family.

When the Berea program was in its infancy, those in charge developed relationships with local rehab and detox facilities. Specifically, Greenhill said, the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services (ADAMHS) Board of Cuyahoga County was useful in learning how to help addicts.

“We want to provide a comprehensive program that can be replicated. We want other agencies to be able to look at what we did and copy that,” Greenhill said.

Between 15 and 20 police agencies now have PAARI-style programs.

Greenhill said he thinks the Safe Passages program is a link between the police and the communities they serve, a link that is more important than ever as officials stare down what could be the deadliest year ever for fatal opioid overdoses.

“It’s serving a part of our community that has been marginalized and ignored. It comes back to what is our mission? Our mission is to protect life and provide service. This is us combining two,” he said.

Helping PAARI Spread

Though Berea has been a happy addition to her network of participating police departments, not every department is as eager to change their approach to addicts, Walmsley said. She didn’t name the department, but one police chief reportedly told her that instead of utilizing PAARI, he preferred addicts kill themselves off.

That attitude hasn’t deterred Walmsley. She still wants to have at least one police department in each of Ohio’s counties signed up with PAARI. If her recent history is any suggestion, that goal is more than achievable, it’s realistic.

From September 2015 to November 2015, Walmsley was only able to get one department, Lodi, to start a PAARI program. She now has nearly 20 police departments on her roster, with others waiting in the wings, watching how their peers’ programs shake out.

One of the reasons departments are sometimes reticent to hear Walmsley out is her history as an addict and convicted felon. With two felony charges, one for drug trafficking and one for drug possession, some police are skeptical of the PAARI pitch.

But Walmsley is not soft on addicts. In fact, she said, she rarely displays compassion for other addicts. When addicts she is working with overdose, she frequently visits them in the hospital and tells them they need to start writing their own obituary and picking out the clothes they want to wear at their funerals.

“I tell them it’s not fair to make their family select the clothes for the funeral,” she says.

She has sympathy for the addicts who display remorse, the people who genuinely want to change their lives. The ones who have overdosed multiple times in a year receive no such quarter from Walmsley. She sees her younger self in those people, and she has the ability to offer them an opportunity she was never offered.

PAARI will help send addicts through detox and rehab, even if they don’t have insurance. If Medicaid won’t cover an addict’s treatment, Walmsley will work to get them scholarships. She’ll try to find the perfect facility for an addict’s treatment, in-state, out-of-state, wherever.

The PAARI program has been successful so far. Walmsley said 70 percent of addicts who go through the program stay clean, partly because there is such a large focus on helping addicts rebuild their frequently destroyed support systems.

“I’ll send the addict’s family through counseling, just to try and start rebuilding those bridges,” she said.

Ultimately, she believes many people don’t know they’re getting hooked. It’s not a conscious choice people make to become an addict. Many people, like Walmsley, were merely prescribed a pain pill and found themselves addicted.

“I view it as both a choice and a disease. It’s a choice when you’re educated. It’s a choice when you know what’s out in front of you and what could happen,” she said. “It’s the same as smoking cigarettes. You know you can get lung cancer from smoking, but you choose to smoke. The difference is that it’s more acceptable to treat the lung cancer patient. Whereas, an addict is solely treated as if they chose that.”

Reflecting on her own addiction, she says, “You choose to speed down the highway and you crash and you’re on fire. It’s gruesome. People are Facebook Live-ing it and not rushing to save you. But you made the choice to speed. Should we not save you? As humans, we have to save you. We need to save you. It’s important for our society.”

Photo via CDC and Patch