James Vara. Photo by Sid Ceaser Photography.
By Ryan Lessard
new@hippopress.com
Take a walk inside the old Hoitt’s Furniture building at 293 Wilson St. in Manchester and you’ll see construction workers busy renovating the first floor, as they have been for the past several weeks. It will soon be the home of HOPE for New Hampshire Recovery. Brick walls, stone foundations and a turn-of-the-century wooden freight elevator reveal an older building than the ’70s-era redesign would have you believe it is. The exterior is covered with a beige stucco-like substance and the roof is still sporting the old company sign, where it’s been for generations. During a recent tour of the first floor, crews were working on the finishing touches needed before the interior walls — existing then only as metal frames — are installed. In just a couple weeks, Scott Statewide Addiction Crisis Line 1-844-711-HELP (4357) HIPPO | SEPTEMBER 22 - 28, 2016 | PAGE 14
Schubert with Anagnost Companies said, this hollow, wireframe shell of an interior will be reborn as office spaces and meeting rooms. With the new recovery and treatment center located at the corner of Valley Street, just a short drive up from the Manchester Police Department, the police will now be bookended by a county jail to the west and the flagship recovery center to the east, both visible from their windows. That image serves as a fitting parallel to the shifting ways the Granite State is tackling addiction. Where once the issue of illicit drug abuse was virtually the sole domain of law enforcement, a greater emphasis on treatment and recovery has taken hold in the past few years, leading to rapid improvements and expansion of a long-neglected system.
Olympian task
To many, the new HOPE facility is seen as ground zero in the fight against the state’s addiction epidemic ravaging New Hampshire. So far in 2016 there have been
241 confirmed drug overdose deaths in the state, and the Medical Examiner’s office expects the year to end with another record death toll: about 480 deaths. Last year there were 439; the figure has been climb-
NH was 49th in the nation for treatment access.* ing since 2012. According to the state health department, emergency room visits for overdoses reached 666 in July, 538 in June and 462 in May. About 40 percent of those happened in Hillsborough County. While there’s no easy way to know how many addicts there are in the state, the rule of thumb nationwide is 10 percent of the population, which would be about 130,000 in New Hampshire, according to Tym Rourke, chairman of the Governor’s Com-
mission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse. Of the 2,562 inmates in the New Hampshire prison system, about 85 percent report having a history of substance abuse. To solve this problem, the state has to face up against the influence of drug trafficking organizations, piece together a healthcare system out of a complicated mess of nonprofit and for-profit providers, insurers and state agencies, and help each struggling individual win the war against their addiction. CEO Eric Spofford of Granite Recovery Centers said the latter is going to be the hardest part. “Addiction’s the same thing that has the the nine-months-pregnant woman trying to [take] dope because her water breaks and she can’t go have this baby before she gets high. Addiction’s the thing where they know they might die but they do it anyway,” Spofford said. “Addiction’s the thing where people lose their children to the state and the addiction is so powerful that, despite their moral convictions and who they are truly as people deep down inside, they can’t stop.”