From handcuffs to a helping hand: CPD reaching out to addicts

With about 200 people dying of heroin overdoses each year in Chicago, the police are preparing to launch a radical new strategy to help addicts caught in narcotics investigations on the West Side.

As usual, officers will arrest people caught buying small amounts of heroin and take them to the police station. But officers will now give them the option of entering a drug-treatment program — and not being charged with a crime.

Users with violent criminal backgrounds and those who are “active gang members” will be excluded, police say.

“This is a one-time get-out-of-jail-free card,” said Ruth Coffman, executive director of the University of Chicago Health Lab, which will evaluate the program.

Two large agencies, Thresholds and the Heartland Alliance, are expected to provide the treatment.

Anthony Riccio, chief of the police department’s organized crime bureau, said he anticipates the program will begin this month in the Harrison, Austin and Ogden police districts.

Officers won’t squeeze the addicts for information on their suppliers, Riccio said.

Asked whether limiting the program to non-gang members is too restrictive, Riccio said he didn’t think so. The sellers are more likely to be gang members, he said.

A study of people arrested for drug possession over a six-month period on the West Side found 217 of them would have been qualified to enter the program, Coffman said.

The program will start small but could expand to other parts of the city if successful, Riccio said.

He said he anticipates that Thresholds and the Heartland Alliance will have representatives at the West Side police facility at Homan Square to meet with users and start them in a treatment program.

Each heroin user will get a program tailored to his or her needs, Coffman said. Many have other problems like homelessness or mental illness, she said.

“You can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to drug treatment,” she said, adding that the program is not a “polio vaccine for addiction.”

“We know it’s not going to help everybody,” she said.

Most of the users will go through outpatient treatment, Coffman said.

Police also will try to divert West Side juvenile drug dealers from the court system. They will be invited to participate in an educational program along with their parents, Riccio said. The juveniles won’t be charged with a crime if they go through the program, he said.

He noted that drug convictions haunt many juveniles on the West Side.

“Once that’s on your record, you can’t be a policeman or a fireman anymore,” Riccio said.

Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin, who represents the West Side, said he supports giving heroin addicts an option other than incarceration.

“I applaud your efforts,” he said during a Thursday city-county heroin task force hearing where the initiative was unveiled.

Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials consider the national rise in drug overdoses – particularly from heroin and other opiates – to be an “epidemic.”

Many users move from prescription painkillers to heroin, which in often cheaper and more accessible. Heroin purchased on the street is usually cut with other substances, many of them potent in their own right, and the quality and mix can be unpredictable.

Fatal overdoses are often the result of a toxic mix of heroin with other substances, including alcohol.

Between 2001 and 2014, the annual number of heroin-related overdoses in the United States soared six-fold, from 1,779 to 10,574. The largest increase was in the Midwest.

About $1 billion of heroin passes through Cook County alone every year, mostly on the West Side, Riccio said. One open-air market at Grenshaw and Independence had hundreds of people standing in line for heroin until police busted the operation last year, he said.

Chicago has such a reputation as a hub for drug trafficking that it attracts heroin users from the suburbs, Downstate and across the Midwest. The number of fatal overdoses in the city has remained at about 200 in each of the last several years.

But the toll has climbed in suburban Cook County (from 97 in 2013 to 127 last year) and across Illinois (from 581 to 761) with 2015 deaths still being counted, according to the state Department of Public Health.

The most common victim is a white male between the ages of 25 and 44, but the epidemic has crossed race, class and geographic lines. Two Chicago Police commanders have even lost their sons to heroin overdoses recently, sources say.

Since 2001, Chicago Police have made nearly 89,000 arrests for heroin possession, records show – an average of about 16 busts a day.

But the pace of arrests has slowed amid a growing sense that incarceration hasn’t solved the problem. In 2001, police made about 8,000 heroin possession busts. In 2015, the number fell to less than half that – 3,800. Cops are on a pace to make far fewer arrests this year.

A handful of police departments – from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to suburban Naperville – have started “amnesty” programs to help addicts find treatment if they turn themselves in to police. But the Chicago program has the potential to impact far more users.

“We are embarking on a different tack,” said Nicholas Roti, head of a federal anti-drug grant program, called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, and a former top Chicago Police supervisor. “Just focusing on the supply side isn’t helping.”