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A person in recovery helping others seek treatment. A Georgetown-educated sober living specialist. A Northeast Washington physician treating patients on the doorstep of the drug trade.
These are some of the 21 people chosen to advise Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and the D.C. Council on how to spend $80 million in opioid settlement money at a time when overdose deaths in the city are on pace to exceed last year’s historic peak.
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The seating of the Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, scheduled for its first public meeting on Oct. 25, opens access to the long-awaited funds, boosting efforts to stem a fentanyl-driven epidemic with an outsize impact on older Black men that is increasingly claiming young lives.
Critics of the city’s opioid response who note that government officials constitute a plurality of the group say they hope the advisory board will focus conversations on comprehensive solutions that shift people in addiction off the streets and into programs that address medical, substance abuse and behavioral health problems. They also said they want to see more urgency from city officials and transparency about how final spending decisions are made by Bowser’s administration.
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“How is this going to make a difference, and what impact can this committee have that the government was unable to discern over the past eight years or so?” said Edwin Chapman, a physician who has treated opioid addiction for more than two decades and sits on the commission. “This is an advisory committee, so we can put things on the table, but the decisions will be made by some — anonymous to me — people who have made the decisions all along.”
The relationship between addiction and systemic problems such as poverty and violence, Chapman said, is on display outside his office daily, where people without housing gather and then disperse as police arrive, in a grim ritual.
As D.C. opens sobering centers, advocates push bolder action on opioids
Annual opioid overdose deaths in D.C. more than doubled to 461 in a five-year period ending in 2022, coinciding with the prevalence of fentanyl in the drug supply. The fatality rate is on pace to exceed last year’s high with 238 deaths through June of this year, according to the latest report from the chief medical examiner, with fentanyl present in 98 percent of deaths so far this year.
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City officials said that the settlement dollars — which are winding their way through similar committees in communities across the country — present a critical opportunity for the District.
There is nearly $14 million in the opioid abatement fund as of this week, according to the attorney general’s office, money that Barbara J. Bazron, director of the Department of Behavioral Health, the city’s lead opioid crisis response agency, said could “augment” the District’s harm reduction approach based on the distribution of naloxone, syringes and fentanyl test strips.
“Harm reduction is critically important because it is really designed to keep people alive. It’s very difficult to get people into recovery if they’re not here with us,” Bazron said in an interview Thursday.
Her agency is finishing the third installment of Live. Long. DC., the opioid response plan, and soon plans to open the city’s first stabilization and sobering center, at 35 K St. NE. The D.C. Council is scheduled on Oct. 26 to debate whether Bowser should declare the opioid and fentanyl crisis a public health emergency.
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D.C. Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission members arrow left arrow right
1) Barbara J. Bazron, director, Department of Behavioral Health
2) Ayanna Bennett, acting director, DC Health
3) Melisa Byrd, interim director, department of health care finance
4) Ciana Creighton, interim deputy mayor health and human services
5) Lindsey Appiah, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice
6) Francisco J. Diaz, D.C. Chief Medical Examiner
7) Brian L. Schwalb, D.C. Attorney General
8) Council member Christina Henderson, chair, D.C. Council health committee
9) Edwin Chapman, Medical Society of D.C. designee
10) Jacqueline D. Bowens, D.C. Hospital Association president and CEO
11) Mark LeVota, D.C. Behavioral Health Association executive director
12) Patricia Quinn, D.C. Primary Care Association designee
13) Juanita Price, CEO Hillcrest Children and Family Center
14) Nnemdi Elias
15) Senora Simpson
16) LaVerne Adams
17) Demetrius Jones
18) Larry Bing
19) Larry Gourdine
20) J. Chad Jackson
21) Beverlyn D. Settles-Reaves
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Council member Christina Henderson, who chairs the health committee and who along with Bazron will sit on the commission, said the District must step up outreach and public safety efforts, with a more visible presence in communities where data and anecdotal evidence show opioid use is high.
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“There are folks in government who acknowledge that everything is not going swimmingly and there are parts of this that we need to improve. There are also people in government that acknowledge we may not have all of the infrastructure necessary in the moment to fully address the issue,” said Henderson (I-At Large).
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), who appointed four members to the commission with Henderson’s help, said he hopes people on the front lines of the crisis will influence government officials to make changes that will turn the corner on the crisis.
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“The government has got to step up and do more, and that includes helping the public understand how broad the problem is,” he said.
At the first meeting, members are scheduled to choose a chairperson, hear a presentation from Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb (D) about the terms of the settlement agreements and begin to form a plan for the grant process.
Like others, J. Chad Jackson, a commission member in recovery with a master’s degree in addiction policy and practice from Georgetown, said that, unlike tobacco settlement dollars, the opioid money must be targeted to address the crisis.
“I’m dedicated to making sure this opioid settlement money goes for abatement of the crisis and doesn’t get diverted to places that don’t have anything to do with the overdose crisis in D.C.,” he said.
The city receives $24 million a year in federal funding to combat the crisis, but that money comes with more strings attached, Bazron said. Settlement dollars can be used to build infrastructure, such as rehabilitation beds that experts say the District is sorely lacking. Bazron said the agency is preparing to seek vendors for a rehabilitation center for young people. Seven teens died of opioid overdoses in the first six months of the year, compared with seven in all of last year and nine the year before, the city medical examiner’s data shows.
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Larry Gourdine, program manager at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, the city’s only free-standing psychiatric hospital, said he assumes the commission will focus on the hardest-hit communities, improving access to prevention and treatment that addresses the biggest gaps in coordination of services.
Gourdine, a commission member, said he is constantly struck by the resiliency of patients who are trying to manage a drug or alcohol addiction while trying to navigate a complicated health-care system and multiple other physical and mental challenges.
“It’s like trying to separate diabetes from heart disease,” he said. “Patients, along with their substance abuse disorder, may have underlying or co-occurring mood and anxiety disorders. They also have co-occurring medical and chronic disease as well: diabetes, hypertension and other illnesses. … Addiction is a brain disease, a chronic, relapsing brain disease.”
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Larry Bing, a peer mentor in Chapman’s office who has a seat on the commission, brings to his work an understanding of what it feels like to live with a combustible mix of a physical addiction to drugs, destructive emotions and unresolved trauma that many coming out of poverty or prison must navigate with no support system.
To those in addiction and despairing, Bing said, drugs feel like a solution — the thing that gets you through another painful day.
“Most people say, ‘What sane person would want to do that?’” he said. “Well, if you’ve never lived that life and you’ve never experienced it, you’re not qualified to even bring that up. You don’t know what it’s like to live on the street. … This is a disease that eats at you from the inside out, and it can destroy you if you allow it.”
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