Battling Meth: A Rural Montana County is on the Frontline of National Foster Care Surge

The rampant opioid epidemic tearing through communities across the United States is exacerbated by a rigid court system that fails to address individual needs and a severe lack of comprehensive treatment options, even for those who want to get clean. Family Treatment Court, like the one in Chautauqua County, N.Y., provides parents who are addicts an innovative intervention program that includes a broad range of custom-tailored services to permanently quit their drug use and keep their families together.

The over-prescription of pain medicine has been a problem in southwest Colorado. Collective efforts of health care providers to standardize opioid prescriptions, clinics to expand recovery programs, and law enforcement to encourage addicts to enter rehab rather than prison, have reduced over-prescriptions of pain medications. However, they also could be unintentionally causing a rise in heroin use.

After the fall of an oppressive and isolating regime, Portugal found itself utterly unprepared to deal with the rapid distribution of narcotics in the 1980s, creating a crisis that left 1 in every 10 people struggling with addiction. The country took a radical approach to rectifying opioid use through a huge cultural shift in the way it viewed and treated addicts - prioritizing support services and pioneering programs like needle-exchange and substitution therapy, and eventually decriminalizing hard drugs so that users could more easily get help, and drug rates have since plummeted.

Temporary Alternative Placement Agreements (TAPA) allow parents struggling with addiction to enter a drug-treatment program and connect them with parenting resources and support to help them maintain custody of their children. Under a TAPA parents have a say in who their children stay with while they're seeking treatment, rather than losing custody altogether. Participants say TAPAs are far less traumatic and help hold them accountable as they’re required to sign an agreement to uphold at the start of the program.

In 2001, facing a 20-year opioid epidemic, Portugal decriminalized all personal drug use, meaning people carrying drugs for personal use could no longer face prosecution or jail. The approach, met with public support, offered people access to services like safe injection sites and counseling and showed demonstrable success in declining opioid related deaths, the spread of infectious diseases, and drug use all together. As the rest of the world faces a similar crisis, Portugal could be a model response.

Rather than treat opioid users like criminals, Vancouver has deemed it a public health crisis. The city, especially its downtown east side, witnessed 1,500 deaths in just one year from opioid use. Its approach is unique and multi-pronged – making Narcan, an overdose antidote, available to everyone, opening safe injection sites, and having a police presence – without arrests – on blocks where using remains high.

By addressing drug addiction as a medical—rather than criminal—issue, Portugal has been able to reduce drug use as well as deaths caused by drugs. Strategies implemented include decriminalization, increased access to treatment, changes in prescribing patterns related to opioids, and ‘dissuasion’ courts.

Signs indicate that a recent surge in the number of children entering the foster system is related to the opioid epidemic. Using the power of keeping families in tact as motivation, the Early Intervention Family Drug Court in Sacramento County works with addicted parents to receive comprehensive early addiction intervention in an attempt to prevent their children from being entered into the foster system.

In one year, the drug overdoses in Roanoke, VA have taken 12 lives and another 76 have overdosed but survived. The police department developed a new program called the Roanoke Valley Hope Initiative, designed to provide rehabilitation without arrest for those who seek it. The program simulates the successful national effort to help drug abusers instead of incarcerating them.

While the decriminalization effort Measure 110 failed to fully meet the mark, the Health Justice Recovery Alliance joined forces with local law enforcement to create a pilot program that helped locals struggling with addiction. Through the program, police can contact an outreach worker who will come to the scene and connect the person struggling with addiction to support services such as detox care and housing, helping lead them toward long-term recovery. So far, the pilot program has helped over 200 people.