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WHAT’S GOING ON IN NKY
Healthcare plans in Cold Spring, a corrupt NKY judge book, and good news Julia Fair Cincinnati Enquirer USA TODAY NETWORK
Daryl Hams, right, a registered nurse and a project director of the Regional Harm Reduction Collaborative, fi lls out paperwork for a client at a makeshift outdoor booth in Hamilton, while Jennifer Williams also helps. AMANDA ROSSMANN/THE ENQUIRER/AMANDA ROSSMAN
PEOPLE WHO CARE: How harm reduction bloomed here with the opioid epidemic
Terry DeMio Cincinnati Enquirer USA TODAY NETWORK
Daryl Hams saw a discolored bandage poking out from the man’s sleeve. The bandage covered a festering abscess. A wound from a contaminated needle. The man had had it cleaned at a hospital but hadn’t yet picked up antibiotics prescribed for him. Daryl, who had never met the man before, handed the stranger fresh bandages, cleansing packets, and urged him to get and take all the antibiotics. Still, Daryl could not stop thinking about the young man. A nurse, Daryl bought wound-care supplies and carried them in a kit for three weeks, hoping to see the man again. Then one day, at the Hamilton naloxone-giveaway site: “Are you the guy with the wound?” Daryl asked a man in a cloth mask. “I was worried about you.” The man proudly showed off a wrist no longer bandaged, the abscess healed. He started to walk away. Then stopped and turned back. “It’s been a long time,” the man said, “since anybody worried about me.” Molly B. True was a 19-year-old college student in the late 1990s when she started using heroin. This was before the epidemic settled into the region. Heroin chic was fashion. Kurt Cobain, idolized. Now 41 and living with her boyfriend in Bellevue, Molly has seven broken-off needles in her body – arms, groin, neck – scarred over, there forever. It makes it tough to get an MRI. Tough to forget that she once had no place to go when she wanted to protect herself from infections. Molly had always tried to use safely. She tried, after getting hepatitis C, not to spread the virus to others. She’d buy syringes when pharmacists would sell them to her. She cared about her health. She says she was addicted to heroin but wasn't ready to get treatment. Molly knew of places across the country where people who injected drugs could get sterile syringes, no judgment. “I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, that’ll never happen in Cincinnati,’” she says.
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Because, in the late 1990s through the early 2000s you were on your own. Today, you are not. Today, there are Daryls. It has taken Greater Cincinnati something like two decades to understand what Daryl and people like him off er. It’s called “harm reduction,” a host of strategies to minimize negative physical and social outcomes from drug use. It’s what those who use drugs can do between prevention and treatment: That place where most people who use drugs simply are. With the heroin epidemic grew the understanding that addiction is a health issue. And fi xing a health problem by locking it in jail, or even by scolding it, was not terribly eff ective. That maybe fi xing it, or starting to, requires being there. Being kind. Helping people stay safe. The epidemic grew. Understanding grew. Life got better for the Mollys of the world. Not everyone understood. Syringe exchange – trading used syringes for sterile ones – still feels wrong to a lot of people, who think it enables drug use. But there is no scientifi c evidence to suggest that people who inject drugs will stop using because they can’t fi nd sterile syringes. They will use what is available. “I remember using needles to inject my drugs that … were bent and it looked like something you’d pulled out of a garbage can, really,” Molly says. Scattershot needles back then led to a groundswell of complaints from neighbors who’d fi nd the syringes in playgrounds, grocery store parking lots and even their own lawns. The hepatitis C virus can live in the barrel of a syringe for up to six weeks. People started to realize they, or their children, could get the bloodborne disease. It was this threat to the general public that led some to begrudgingly accept the idea of the harm reduction strategy syringe exchange. “Everybody (who used), pretty much, had hepatitis,” Molly says. “A few people had HIV. “But your life is in such shambles from addiction that you don’t care.” Dr. Judith Feinberg, an infectious
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disease expert who at the time was a professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, cared. She is the pioneer of harm reduction in Cincinnati. She saw hepatitis C cases rising and, by 2006, thought it was time for syringe exchange. Feinberg gathered research to point to the positive results of harm reduction elsewhere. Syringe exchanges had been going on for years, most notably after the AIDS crisis evolved in the 1980s and ‘90s. Feinberg took that evidence and met with public health offi cials, city leaders, neighbors. Steadily, she pushed for syringe exchange. Her analysis showed what newer studies amplify: Syringe services have been associated with a 50% reduction in HIV and hepatitis C. They cost less than $2 a day per person, research shows. Compare that to the lifetime cost of HIV treatment which is about $350,000 per person. The annual cost of hepatitis C treatment? About $84,000 per patient. That, and this: “People who use drugs are fi ve times more likely to enter treatment” if they use harm reduction, Feinberg says, noting U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. In 2014, Feinberg got the go-ahead to start a needle exchange. The fi rst attempt failed from community pushback, but The Cincinnati Exchange Project was operating a few months later, outside Church of Our Savior in Mount Auburn. The Cincinnati health board approved the exchange. UC College of Medicine covered major costs. Interact for Health supplied a grant. And as the mobile exchange expanded into several Cincinnati neighborhoods, Molly caught wind of it. “I’m like, ‘Impossible,’” she recalls. “I did a little investigating, because that’s what I do,” the former Northern Kentucky University journalism student says. The exchange was a place to get things: sterile syringes, drug-cooking devices and clean wipes, naloxone, HIV and hepatitis C tests, condoms. But it was not just about things. It was about treating people with dignity – an underpinning of harm reduction strategy, says Feinberg. See HARM REDUCTION, Page 4A
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This is an installment of reporter Julia Fair’s series “By the way, NKY.” Here, you’ll fi nd what’s going on in Northern Kentucky. If there’s something you think should be included, email reporter Julia Fair at jfair@enquirer.com Editor’s note: Information included refl ects this article’s original publication date – Feb. 16 (updated Feb. 18). By the way, here’s what’s going on in Northern Kentucky:
St. Elizabeth Healthcare makes plans in Cold Spring Do you remember when another piece of news was hiding within the land battle over the Disabled American Veterans grounds in Cold Spring? I do. When the Campbell County Board of Education made moves to take the private property for a new school, the city advocated a diff erent plan. The city was in the loop about the developer’s plans to put a health care facility on the 30-acre site. At the time, I asked Cold Spring Mayor Angelo Penque what the facility was and which company would own it. He declined to answer. I had a feeling it could be St. Elizabeth Healthcare. So, I reached out to its spokesperson, who didn’t say yes or no and instead gave a very vague answer. That’s usually what happens when a development plan hasn’t been announced. Well, now we know that St. Elizabeth Healthcare is working with Cincinnati-based developer AI. Neyer, fi rst reported by Fort Thomas Matters, an online news site. But the details about what kind of facility it will be are still murky. “We have been working with Neyer as the health care partner for this development. While we do not have defi nitive plans at this time, we look forward to expanding access to quality healthcare in the Northern Kentucky community,” said Guy Karrick, spokesperson for St. Elizabeth Healthcare. Cold Spring City Attorney Brandon Voelker shared some details about the deal at a council meeting in January. The proposed facility is estimated to cost up to $85 million and create about 240 jobs with an average salary between $85,000 and $95,000.
Book recounts the tale of a disbarred Boone County judge Believe it or not, I enjoy reading books after a full day of reading and writing news. I usually pick up historical or true crime books because – surprise – I like reading about things that actually happened. So when I heard about a Lexingtonbased author’s book about a Northern Kentucky judge scandal, I was intrigued. No, this book is not about former Kenton County Family Court Judge Dawn Gentry. It’s about Jay Bamberger, a former circuit court judge in See NKY, Page 2A
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