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You can walk into a clinic in Alameda County and leave with a free syringe, fentanyl test strip and naloxone kit with no questions asked. But if you ask for real treatment, you’ll be put on a waitlist that may never reach you at all.
The government isn’t rescuing, it’s containing. What looks like care is merely triage designed to avoid corpses in public parks.
Alameda County is set to receive between $46 million and $80 million over the next two decades from nationwide opioid settlements with drug manufacturers and distributors. This funding is intended to undo the damage wrought by the opioid epidemic.
And yet, according to the county’s own official documents, even with that amount of money, there is still a dangerous shortage of detox beds, medication-assisted treatment (MAT) and long-term recovery options.
Public listening sessions that are hosted by Alameda County Behavioral Health show that this is not what residents are asking for. Instead, they seek real treatment — not more kits, strips or excuses.
The entire state of California has focused the majority of its resources on incomplete harm reduction efforts. The California Harm Reduction Initiative has allocated $15.2 million statewide for syringe access, Narcan naloxone, fentanyl test strips and community outreach. HEPPAC’s OPEND program offers naloxone kits with unlimited refills, all without offering a true pathway to treatment.
These programs save lives in the short term, but do nothing to change them in the long run. In this flawed system lies an endless loop of dependency wrapped in plastic, distributed over folding tables.
Perhaps the most damning sign that the system doesn’t truly care is the absence of a “warm handoff” protocol — a practice in which overdose survivors are transitioned directly from the emergency room into a treatment program.
Alameda County has no such protocol. This means that a person can overdose on fentanyl, be revived by emergency staff, and be discharged the same night with nothing but a Narcan kit.
According to research compiled by SoberMind Recovery, 1 in 20 overdose survivors will die within a year after being discharged. Opioid overdose accounts for two-thirds of those deaths.
The government isn’t helping people live — it’s just helping them not die. If it doesn’t haunt us that Narcan is everywhere and recovery is nowhere, then maybe we’ve stopped caring too.
Editor’s note: Emily Wang is a junior at American High School in Fremont and a Junior Journalist in the Alameda County Opioid Awareness Project, a program to educate youth and others about the opioid crisis in the county. The Pleasanton Weekly received a grant funded by the Alameda County Behavioral Health Department to help lead the project.
You forgot to include the insurance industry’s role in this article, which extends beyond just addiction treatment, but also mental health treatment.