U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack challenged New Hampshire communities Tuesday to get past the stigma of addiction, see it for what it is – a disease – and work with local, state and federal partners to treat it.
“We’re losing a lot of people and we’re all paying for this,” Vilsack said at a statewide summit on substance abuse in Manchester. “All of us have a responsibility.”
But a plan to sell state property in Laconia for a treatment center has seen resistance from city leaders and is now likely dead on arrival when the Senate takes up the proposal Thursday.
Laconia’s city council was prepared to formally oppose state Sen. Jeanie Forrester’s plan to turn the former Laconia State School into a rehabilitation facility. From the council’s perspective, the 250-acre property – empty now and formerly a minimum-security prison and school for people with disabilities – could be put to a use with a “higher and better value,” Laconia Mayor Edward Engler said.
Engler, a city councilor and a Laconia resident contacted Forrester with their opposition, and now she is planning to kill her own amendment after it was approved 4-2 by the Senate Finance Committee just a week earlier.
Forrester said Tuesday that she planned to divide the question and vote down the amendment on the Senate floor Thursday.
“I don’t expect to have any problem with it,” she said.
Vilsack, the keynote speaker at the summit Tuesday, urged state leaders to work together to find solutions and overcome opposition.
“We all know this is an issue. We all know the statistics,” Vilsack said. “This is clearly an issue in rural America.”
New Hampshire, for instance, had the second highest jump in overdose deaths in the nation between 2013-14 – an increase of 73.5 percent, only behind North Dakota’s 125 percent rise, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Granite State also has the third highest overdose death rate in the U.S.
Especially in small, isolated towns, Vilsack said, “there’s this judgment that attached – it keeps people quiet. There’s no time for quietness here.” Instead, he added, the faith-based community, the education community, the health care community, plus law enforcement and state actors, all have a part to play.
Given an alarming rise in overdose deaths across the country – there were 28,648 in 2014 – President Obama named Vilsack, who is also the chairman of the White House Rural Council, as the head of a task force in January to address the issue. About the same time, Obama also submitted a $1.1 billion budget proposal to Congress to pour funds toward addiction treatment.
On Tuesday, Vilsack didn’t specify how much funding New Hampshire could get, though he did outline the ways it could be used: increasing medication-assisted treatment capacity, supporting prescription monitoring and physician training programs, and arming first responders with the overdose-reversal drug Narcan.
Vilsack said there are other USDA grant programs that could help create community gardens and open farming opportunities for people going through drug court. Food could be grown for local schools, restaurants, universities or hospitals, he said.
“They could create a small business opportunity within the court system that would give people skills that are transferable to the real world,” Vilsack said.
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Center for Telehealth recently received $1 million in grants to connect to rural hospitals and doctor’s offices and help bring opioid addiction treatment to the most rural corners of the state.
“I can be very confident in saying New Hampshire would see expanded treatment options with this money,” Vilsack said in an interview with the Monitor.
A Laconia police officer, school staffer and coalition leader were among the 800 or so people to attend Tuesday’s summit in Manchester. Overall, Engler said the city has a desire to address the opioid addiction crisis.
“As far as the treatment end of things . . . I don’t think we’re different than anyone else,” Engler said. “We’re certainly lacking in programs and facilities.”
While he and others don’t agree with the state property being used for a treatment facility, he said there is a committee – including Senate Finance Committee member Sen. Andrew Hosmer – meeting every week to try to open a Hope for New Hampshire Recovery Center there.
“They’re working diligently,” Engler said.
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)