Friday, May 19, 2017

High, Everybody!

How many people are there in Clallam County?

North Olympic Healthcare Network plans to nearly triple the capacity of a program that provides medication for addicts trying to get off opioids after being awarded $250,000 in funding from the Salish Behavioral Health Organization. NOHN will transition over the next couple months into having a nurse care manager model for its medicine-assisted treatment program and has hired more providers, allowing it to increase its current capacity of about 120 Suboxone patients up to about 300, said CEO Dr. Michael Maxwell.

How many people are there in Clallam County? And how many of them are addicts? The way things keep "developing" there, you'd think all the local elected officials own stock in the company that manufactures Suboxone. That would at least be one explanation for the chaos and dysfunction they've created.

11 comments:

  1. At a public talk last Feb., county health officer Dr. Chris Frank gave a candidly loose estimate in the high hundreds county-wide, and said many are fairly functional, with jobs, families, etc. It's a deep dark secret for those folks and you can't find them to count them. Because they still connect with the world, they may be the easiest to reach and salvage with programs like this. The ones Adam Chamberlin is persecuting are not representative of the big picture.

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    1. And for clarity...Nothing I've said here is meant to add to any persecution, okay? I'm just marveling at the (no pun intended) high, high rates, and connecting the dots from that to a local economy on life support, and from that to the moronic decisions made by the so-called "leaders" of Clallam County.

      Is it still "leading" if you go off the road into a ditch?

      Or is it into a canyon?

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    2. Look at the national scene, and those that think everything is great, and that the only problems are that the media is treating the president unfairly. Is that leadership? Or, is that driving off into oblivion with the peddle to the metal?

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  2. Just put Suboxone in the water with the fluoride. Problem solved. Might as well put in a bit of birth control to cure teen pregnancies, a bit of Zoloft to cheer folks up, a bit of THC to mellow everyone out, a bit of truth serum for the upcoming elections...the opportunities are endless.

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  3. This is how Port Angeles spells success.

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    1. Can we get the chamber of commerce to work on a marketing campaign touting Port Angeles as a great place to get high and/or dry?

      Naw. Now that I think about it, they'd just screw that up too.

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  4. Um, exactly why chasing grants isn't a good business model. You forego your own vision of what your place could be, and let the grants define what you are and what you do. And everyone seems just fine with this.

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    1. Yet even with the grants, they still flounder, the grant projects fail, and they still don't know what they are or could be.

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    2. Grants are appropriate when cost sharing is necessary. I am not seeing any massive influx of cash from local economy. While it can be argued that political choices for limited budget have been inappropriate, it is fiscally sound to chase federal and state sources of "free" money. Dependency on them is absurd, as they can disappear with each fiscal year. Nonetheless they are still valuable. Vision is great, but reality here is addict city, like much of rural America.

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  5. The only growth industries in this town are drug rehab and social services. Gotta love the business model though...doctors prescribe opioids to begin with, make addicts, cut them off, make non functioning addicts, then rehab for some with doctors cashing in again, jail for others, families collapse, increased crime, insurance rates go up, city becomes even more undesirable, budget motels become serenity houses, more police needed, social services business booming.

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    1. There you go! Exactly what we see going on, here.

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