PHOTO BY BOB ROCHE
Attorney General Maura Healey, middle, makes a point to Lori Abrams Berry, executive director of Lynn’s Community Health Center, and chief medical officer Dr. Kiame Mahaniah.
Attorney General Maura Healey’s visit, last Thursday, to the Lynn Community Health Center to talk about the war against opiate addiction highlights, once again, an oft-asked question: Does Lynn do more than its fair share to help the addicted or is it the perfect place to wage the battle on a still fiercer level?
Healey praised the Center as a front line combatant against opiate addiction. Treatment programs in the Union Street facility, dating back 10 years and the Center is only one of several local facilities providing addiction treatment, counseling and giving addicts a safe and stable place to live and testing them to ensure they are staying drug-free.
From the methadone clinic off the Lynnway, to treatment residences on Green Street, to the Center’s downtown location, the battle against opiate addiction predates valiant, but smaller-scale efforts in many Massachusetts communities and certainly in neighboring cities and towns.
There are those who loudly and forcefully argue for curtailing, if not ending, Lynn’s status as a destination for drug treatment. The argument flies back and forth, with Not In My Backyard proponents saying the city shoulders more than its fair share of treatment locations, while critics argue the city needs to continue stepping up to battle a deadly addiction problem that is claiming the lives of Lynn natives.
There is a point of view that suggests cities like Lynn are locked in a vicious circle when it comes to addiction: Local treatment centers draw addicts seeking help, but not all addicts grasp recovery and some relapse and use drugs locally, only to re-enter treatment – and so the revolving door circles round and round.
The argument is one without winners and it frames a debate that probably will never end. Police officers, firefighters, emergency room workers, funeral directors, grieving families and friends all know opiate addiction translates into lives lost. The crisis, epidemic, war – whatever label is plastered on it – has captured state and national attention and spawned a lot of questions.
One major debate revolves around asking if addicts should bypass the courts and jail and be sent on a fast track to treatment. Another debate revolves the roles doctors and pharmaceutical companies play in limiting access to narcotic relief.
Probably the most basic question to ask about addiction is when is enough, in fact, enough? In other words, when is the lure of an opiate high and the resulting threat of addiction finally banished the same way other diseases have been relegated to the scrap heap of medical history?