Our view: Police step out in front of heroin scourge
By going public with their decision to help heroin addicts kick the drug rather than arrest them, Rolling Meadows police are putting themselves out there. We'd like to believe it will save lives.
By inviting addicts to come forward and ask for help without fear of arrest, the cops in Rolling Meadows are offering to get involved before the usual ways they get involved — saving a life with a last-minute injection of naloxone or, worse, being called to collect the body.
Rolling Meadows police are inviting addicts to come in, bring their stash of drugs and get the treatment referral they need. Their drugs get flushed, and addicts get placed in a 90-day program for free.
If this works, if it saves even just a few lives, it will show there is a better way. A better way than putting an addict into the court system instead of treatment, or forcing an addict to hire a lawyer instead of a doctor.
Suburban police officers all get this. They are often the first to arrive at the scene of an opioid overdose, where the speed with which a cop pulls out his or her vial of naloxone and injects it into the dying addict is all that stands between someone's life and death.
It must be exhilarating to save a life, but it would be better if it didn't come to that.
There are other organizations dedicated to helping addicts kick opioids, but through no fault of their own they are less high-profile. Every community has a police department. Not every addict is aware of, say, Live4Lali, an Arlington Heights-based agency with an excellent track record of saving the lives of heroin addicts.
In Gloucester, Massachusetts, police started doing this in May. Because the Essex County, Massachusetts, district attorney's office already offers addicts treatment in lieu of prosecution (for nonviolent offenses), there are some statistics. Last year, 72 people enrolled in the program and more than half successfully completed it.
Rolling Meadows Police Chief Dave Scanlan says has seen enough heroin deaths.
“We have been there for the death investigations. We have talked to the families, we have been in the homes of these kids,” he told reporter Melissa Silverberg.
“You go to someone's house and you have a kid laying there stiff in the corner with a heroin needle in his arm and the parents going berserk. It doesn't take too many of those to see we need a change.”
Police are already on the front lines of the heroin scourge. We congratulate Rolling Meadows police for thinking that can put their position to even better use.