HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - A new base is being raised in a key battleground of Connecticut’s opioid epidemic: the bustling Park Street corridor where drug deaths in Hartford are most concentrated.
The harm reduction center opens in January in a former law office on Grand Street, it’s ammunition a combination of director Mark Jenkins’ straight talk and belly laugh and his large stocks of clean syringes and heroin cookers, fentanyl test strips, condoms and candy.
Jenkins supplies them to drug-dependent people and sex workers to alleviate the dangers they face, and ultimately draw them in to recovery. His organization, the 5-year-old Greater Hartford Harm Reduction Coalition, has operated a drop-in resource center on Albany Avenue since last summer, but it’s essentially an outpost in the epidemic, serving a population with far lower rates of fatal overdoses than the neighborhoods around Park Street.
The state medical examiner counted 59 drug deaths in Hartford between January and July of this year, up 40% from the same period in 2018. Nearly 60% of this year’s fatal overdoses took place south of Capitol Avenue, and a third were in the ZIP code that encompasses Frog Hollow, Parkville, Behind the Rocks and Southwest Hartford.
While the center at 557 Albany Ave., called The Drop, attracted a healthy 12,800 visits in its first 12 months, the coalition says its new facility at 28 Grand St., in Frog Hollow, should make the organization the largest needle exchange provider in the state.
“We’ll probably jump to 300,000 to 400,000” syringes per year, Jenkins said last week. “But who knows. This time next year, could be half a million. This year isn’t even over and we’re more than we’ve ever given out.”
The coalition has been operating since 2014 and harm reduction practices date back to the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s, but support for Jenkins’ methods has come slowly. It’s only in the past year that he’s gotten the emergency departments at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center and Hartford Hospital to distribute overdose prevention kits and found partners willing to operate needle exchange programs in Bristol, Enfield, New Britain and Torrington.
“I’d love to have these at all four corners of the city,” Hartford Police Lt. Paul Cicero said. “I think it’s a tremendous assistance. I think it’s long overdue and any resources that could help drug dependent people in the city is welcome.”
But Jenkins still faced a zoning battle when he sought to consolidate his two Albany Avenue locations - The Drop and his headquarters in the Collin Bennett Building - by taking on the storefront next to the drop-in center, 559 Albany Ave. He began leasing that space in May and is only now making the switch, about $10,000 in fruitless rent payments later.
And in Frog Hollow, Jenkins initially met pushback from the business community who worried he would damage the commercial environment if he opened a resource center on Park Street proper. With the blessing of the mayor, city council and Spanish American Merchants Association, Jenkins instead rented a space 500 feet away at 28 Grand St.
“We felt there’s a great need, but it’s better to be off the strip itself, so we supported it and now, thank god, they’ve found a place on Grand Street and we’re looking forward to working with them going forward,” said SAMA Executive Director Julio Mendoza. “It’s a great epidemic and we have to do whatever we can to help the individuals who are having this difficulty. It’s tough.”
Mayor Luke Bronin agreed that the center will serve a critical need, but that it’s best to strike a balance between working in the heart of Frog Hollow and listening to neighborhood stakeholders.
“To be effective, you need harm reduction presence where the problem is - but I think there isn’t any one location alone where it can be successful or not,” he said.
With another year, Jenkins thinks he could have opened in the middle of the business district, but he didn’t push it.
“Another year, for what, you know? To be one block away and then continue to alienate half of the establishment,” he said. “I’d rather use a site a block off Park Street and have more community partners and promote some good will among service providers.”
Drugs are still ubiquitous along Park Street, from the Parkville CTfastrak station to Main Street, spilling into the beleaguered Barnard Park in South Green. The smell of marijuana is in the air, needles and empty nips in the grass and addicts linger around barbershops, markets and vacant lots.
To claim it isn’t the epicenter of Hartford’s drug activity, “ground zero” for drug deaths, is just denial, Jenkins says.
Harm reduction centers counteract some of that vice by providing people with clean needles, new crack stems, cotton balls and alcohol wipes, fentanyl testing trips and naloxone, the opioid-overdose antidote.
The workers are nonjudgmental but firm, the services free and the amenities more generous than anywhere else in the city to a difficult and sometimes unruly population.
At The Drop, open since August 2018, visitors can ride out their high in a waiting room-style lounge with air conditioning and a mounted TV playing popular movies. Clients sometimes play chess around a table in the window, and staff and volunteers keep time over the bathroom because the person inside may be using. There’s free coffee and instant ramen for those who stick around.
And often, visitors return. Eventually, when they decide they need treatment, they know who to ask.
“For people not yet ready to change, we have to keep them alive until they’re ready to accept treatment and services,” Robin Deutsch, a physician with Hartford HealthCare, told Hartford city council members during a recent public comment session.
A good number of Jenkins’ clients get clean, and some have become volunteers, and eventually, paid staff. One of those workers, Jose Lozada, helped Jenkins - a recovered addict himself - run the needle exchange at the Parkville Station on Thursday.
One of their clients that afternoon was Luke Saturski, who rides CTfastrak about once a month from wherever he’s living at the time to pick up a bundle of heroin, which costs half as much in Hartford as it does in the suburbs, he said.
While he’s here, he also trades in used needles for clean ones, which he shares with friends. But this time, he forgot to bring the bulk of his syringes, about 350, from his New Britain apartment. Jenkins offered to have someone pick them up.
“You’ll come to my house?” Saturski asked. “You do deliveries like that?”
“You have that many?” Jenkins said. “Hell yeah. I’ll come myself.”
New Britain wasn’t home to a needle exchange until the coalition began offering one there earlier this year. None exists in Plainville, where Saturski is from and hopes to return.
“It’s suburban, white collar, you know,” he said, bouncing lightly on his feet and fidgeting with his bag of syringes. “Not saying it’s perfect, but the town of Plainville probably wouldn’t accept something like that.”
Saturski also took home a dose of naloxone, which he used to revive a friend just two weeks ago.
While preliminary data from 2018 suggested opioid deaths were on the decline, drug deaths in Connecticut have increased.
The state’s chief medical examiner has confirmed 544 drug deaths in the first half of this year, up 5% from 2018. Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, was involved in 78% of this year’s deaths from January to July, compared to 72% during the same period last year.
A number of factors contribute to the concentration along Park Street. There’s the transit hub and the dirt-cheap drug prices drawing users from the suburbs; the concentration of shelters and methadone clinics; and a heavily Hispanic population.
Overdose rates have been rising faster among Latinos and blacks than whites, and a lack of bilingual services have given short shrift to Spanish speakers. Jenkins plans to hold naloxone trainings in Spanish at the Grand Street center, something he’s only done three times so far.
“The essence of harm reduction is meeting people where they are, in their own time, space and element,” Jenkins said.
Another new service will be a computer lab, funding permitting, that should draw clients in who will otherwise frequent the new library branch being built on Park Street. The space is still under construction and won’t officially open until January, but needle exchange services will be available there as often as Jenkins can manage it.
“We’re gonna open the doors right now because that’s what we do,” he said. “We get the most done for the least.”
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