sober home response - News - The Coastal Star2024-03-29T12:19:13Zhttps://thecoastalstar.com/profiles/blogs/feed/tag/sober+home+responseOverdose and Sober Home Response: Task force takes on local issueshttps://thecoastalstar.com/profiles/blogs/overdose-and-sober-home-response-task-force-takes-on-local-issues2016-08-03T19:00:36.000Z2016-08-03T19:00:36.000ZThe Coastal Starhttps://thecoastalstar.com/members/TheCoastalStar<div><p><strong>By Jane Smith</strong><br /><br /> With $275,000 in hand from the Florida Legislature, Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg led the first meetings of the Sober Homes Task Force in mid-July at the West Palm Beach police station’s community room.<br /> His chief assistant, Al Johnson, had spent the past three months assembling the group that includes elected officials, industry workers and advocates, prosecutors, fire-rescue workers and town attorneys. <br /> At the second session, held two days later, nearly half had connections to South County coastal cities. At this meeting Aronberg gave each task force member a business card with a toll-free hotline (844-324-5463) for the public to report questionable business practices of recovery industry providers.<br /> The task force goal is finding ways to clean up the sober home industry by the end of the year. It will focus on four areas: regulation, clarifying laws, policies and marketing plans. <br /> “Lives are at risk,” Johnson said. “This is not about shutting down sober homes or recovery residences. But it’s about protecting the vulnerable patients.”<br /> He rattled off overdose data for Delray Beach. For all of 2015, the city had 195 heroin overdoses compared with the first six months of this year, when the city recorded 242 overdoses from heroin.<br /> Justin Chapman, a prosecutor with the Southwest Florida State Attorney’s Office, was hired to run the task force. He talked about stopping rogue treatment centers from giving kickbacks to sober homes to get patients on the centers’ treatment plan and run up insurance bills. <br /> Ted Padich, formerly with the state Division of Insurance, is another new hire. Both also will be involved with the law enforcement group of the task force.<br /> Rogue providers will find the loopholes, said Suzanne Spencer, executive director of the Delray Beach Drug Task Force. She encouraged strong enforcement of the rules.<br /> Former Delray Beach City Commissioner Adam Frankel said he was from the “rehab capital of the world where not a day goes by when you don’t see a kid lugging a suitcase down the street,” indicating the person was just evicted from a sober home. He wants to see a no-nonsense approach to clean up the recovery industry. <br /> Boca Raton City Councilman Scott Singer simply asked for help maintaining the quality of life in his city’s communities.<br /> Most agreed that stronger regulations are needed for treatment centers because the Department of Children and Families does not have the money to do it adequately. The task force will look at whether the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration is more suited to do the job because it licenses health care facilities.<br /> Sober homes, though, can’t be regulated because of federal housing and disability laws. Recovering drug and alcohol users who live together while maintaining sobriety are considered a family and a protected class. <br /> The voluntary certification provided by the Florida Association of Recovery Residences has fallen behind, even though providers pay a fee to be certified. The certification just became mandatory July 1 for state-licensed treatment centers that send their patients to sober homes.<br /> Treatment centers can bypass the law by opening their own recovery residences or patients can choose on their own to live in a noncertified place, said a DCF spokeswoman.<br /> Some attendees, including Andrew Burki who heads the Life of Purpose Treatment at Florida Atlantic University, said third-party brokers are a major problem. He thinks the task force needs to define “brokering” so that the law is better enforced. <br /> “We can’t prosecute our way out of a systematic problem,” Johnson said. “Once the lights go out, the roaches come back out.”<br /> George Jahn, who runs Sober Living in Delray Beach, said brokering was a criminal enterprise. “People doing it are in it for the money, not the heart,” he said.<br /> A county fire-rescue employee, Matt Willhite, suggested that standards need to be written for who can run a sober home, its capacity and the type of care given.<br /> Johnson said he’d like “to stop the commerce between recovery residences and marketing providers, the flop houses who give heroin to vulnerable addicts to get them back into rehab.”<br /> The task force has a schedule that calls for two meetings each month through June. The public meetings are held at the West Palm Beach police station. The law enforcement group meetings are closed to the public.</p></div>Overdose and Sober Home Response: Frankel pursues federal optionshttps://thecoastalstar.com/profiles/blogs/overdose-and-sober-home-response-frankel-pursues-federal-options2016-08-03T18:57:39.000Z2016-08-03T18:57:39.000ZThe Coastal Starhttps://thecoastalstar.com/members/TheCoastalStar<div><p><strong>By Jane Smith</strong></p>
<p> The feds may be coming to the rescue of South County coastal cities beleaguered by the proliferation of sober homes. <br /> Their chief ally is U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel. <br /> In mid-July, she met with one of the original authors of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the 1988 law that added disability status to the Fair Housing Act. Recovering drug users living as a family while maintaining their sobriety are considered a disabled class that is protected under federal law. <br /> The law’s author suggested that Frankel reach out to individuals in the disability rights community to help make the case that “over-concentration of sober homes creates de facto segregation and violates the long-standing principles of integrating disabled individuals into the community,” according to Frankel’s July 15 letter. <br /> Boca Raton Mayor Susan Haynie appreciates Frankel’s efforts. “She really is attacking this on all levels. It’s really a federal issue,” Haynie said. “We tried on the local level and failed. Statewide, the voluntary certification is a step in the right direction. But the rubber meets the road on the federal level.”<br /> In addition, Frankel and 16 congressional colleagues sent a letter in early July to the U.S. Government Accountability Office asking for help in determining the number of sober homes nationally, statewide and locally. <br /> The letter also asks the GAO to determine the regulations that cover sober homes, the range of services they provide and their roles in Medicaid and other federal insurance programs for drug and alcohol abuse. <br /> “There is so much that we don’t know about sober homes,” said Frankel, a Democrat, who persuaded eight Republican representatives to sign the letter. “Parents who send their kids to sober homes to recover from addiction don’t know if they are effective. When problems arise, local governments do not know how to regulate and address community concerns.”<br /> Delray Beach Mayor Cary Glickstein marveled at the coast-to-coast support for the sober homes issue. “It illustrates that we are getting national support from both sides of the aisle and reiterates (that sober home proliferation is) not a parochial problem,” he said. “If there ever was a bipartisan issue, (this) is one.” <br /> The city’s public safety departments spend an increasing amount of time responding to overdose calls. In the first six months of 2016, Delray Beach saw 242 overdose calls from heroin alone, compared with 195 heroin overdose calls in 2015. <br /> Frankel’s letter follows one sent by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in early June to the GAO. Warren had two Republican co-signers: Sens.Marco Rubio of Florida and Orrin Hatch of Utah.<br /> Warren’s office publicist said the office would let her letter speak for itself. A call to Rubio’s office was not returned.<br /> The GAO said it has accepted the requests, “but the work is not expected to get underway until late this year. Once it begins, the first steps will be to determine the exact scope of what we will cover and the methodology to be used.”<br /> Boynton Beach Mayor Steven Grant said his city would not wait until the feds can act. The city will proceed with its local business certification program to identify all home-based businesses and ensure the city is collecting the appropriate tax from the business. <br /> Meanwhile, Haynie and Glickstein are waiting for the joint statement promised by Frankel after attending a sober homes forum in May. Before the forum, Frankel and an assistant HUD secretary toured sober home locations in Delray Beach. They saw luggage, clothing and furniture on front lawns, indicating evictions.<br /> The assistant secretary was shocked and said he would go back to Washington and secure a joint statement from HUD and Department of Justice lawyers that cities could use as a basis for local regulations.<br /> In her mid-July update, Frankel said, “The agencies have assured us that they are working hard to release the new joint statement in the near future, possibly as soon as August.”</p></div>