The Police Department That Offers Heroin Addicts Amnesty

Here is a daring policy that may be the model for breaking one category of incarceration failures created by the “war on drugs”

The young woman nursing a fresh black eye has come to the police station in this old fishing city for help. But she’s not looking to report a crime or seek someone’s arrest. She wants help kicking her heroin addiction.

“It was better than the alternative,” says the woman, in her mid-20s, as she waits wearily for her ride to a detox center, following a long night that involved a stint in the emergency room, wrestling with the early pains of withdrawal and, finally, sleep in a police holding cell. “I just knew if I was let go, I’d just go out and use.”

Gloucester is taking a novel approach to the war on drugs, making the police station a first stop for addicts on the road to recovery.

Under a policy launched in June, heroin and opioid addicts who voluntarily turn themselves in at the station are fast-tracked into treatment services through a team of police officers, volunteers and trained clinicians.

They aren’t charged with a crime, and much of their treatment cost is covered through public and private insurance, grants by service providers and by police using money seized from drug dealers.

They can even hand over drugs and drug paraphernalia to police, no questions asked.

As of Thursday, police say, 104 addicts turned themselves in seeking help. All have been placed into drug treatment programs at a total cost of about $5,000 to the department.

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.