KINGSTON – Juan Figueroa remembers how crack cocaine turned users into criminals more than 30 years ago when they committed crimes to support their drug habit.
So, when he was running for Ulster County sheriff at the end of the last decade, he encountered families dealing with the scourge of the current opioid epidemic.
“I guess it was my passion for what happened to me and my community back in the 80s with the crack epidemic,” he said. “Nobody cared about what happened.”
Figueroa, upon getting elected, set up the county’s Opioid Response As Law Enforcement (ORACLE) team, so law enforcement officers would direct users to treatment instead of jail.
“Locking up people wasn’t working,” the sheriff said on Tuesday.
“Even if URGENT (drug task force) goes in and does an arrest and there are users there, they call up the ORACLE team and they get them to rehab. Have you ever heard of law enforcement ever doing that? No. So, it is a different approach and it is something the people wanted. It is more importantly locking them up and throwing away the key wasn’t working,” he said.
The teams consist of law enforcement officers, and recovery professionals such as social workers, advocates and case managers, and county opioid overdose deaths, outside of the City of Kingston, dropped from 43 in 2018 to 18 in 2019, the first year of the program.
During 2020, as the pandemic isolated many, deaths rose to 43 again in the county, outside of Kingston. Through the end of April this year, 12 people of have died from overdoses in the county, and 11 in Kingston.
“The first year we reduced our numbers by 33 percent, but the pandemic turned that upside down,” said Figueroa.
Opioid overdose deaths in Kingston have been persistently high compared to the rest of the county, with 15 in 2019 and 23 in 2020. So far, as the nation pulls out of the epidemic, the city is on pace to come close to last year’s total.
“It’s frightening, it really is,” said Kingston Mayor Steve Noble, who believes the ORACLE approach will aid the city’s efforts.
“We’ve got really good providers in Kingston, it’s just breaking that cycle, and is what this is all about,” he said.
Noble said the city’s numbers “were heading in the right direction prior to the pandemic. We just need to get back to that place.”
Both Noble and Figueroa have misgivings and sorrow about the past, with law enforcement’s role in criminalizing addicts, and individual choices to fall victim to these powerful drugs.
But the sheriff is also proud of the county law enforcement efforts to humanize and to try and solve this problem – while helping their communities.
“There was once a time when a family could not even bury somebody, and we set up a GoFundMe page to bury the individual,” said Figueroa. “So that trust is one of the most important things of the ORACLE program.”
