Lawmakers say it’s time to stop treating drug addicts like criminals. But what happens when criminals become drug addicts?
Vermont’s prisons have become the latest front in the state’s ongoing fight against opiate addiction. And lawmakers are looking to curb the flow of illegal drugs into the state’s correctional facilities.
“Obviously it concerns me that somebody would go into a Vermont prison without an addiction and come out with an addiction to an opiate,” says Sen. Dick Sears, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Sears says the availability of opiates inside Vermont’s prisons has become a serious problem. He says stricter security protocols at prison gates would reduce the volume of narcotics being smuggled inside. And he and the Shumlin administration are pushing for legislation that would impose courthouse-like security measures on anyone entering a Vermont prison.
“My vision of this is when you walk in similar to what you experience when you go into a court building, your stuff goes on a conveyor belt, and you go through a metal detector, and off you go,” says Commissioner of Correction Andy Pallito.
Pallito says it’s difficult to know how many narcotics are being smuggled into prison, or how many inmates are using them. But he says the drug trade fuels violence. And he says there’s some evidence that drug debts played a role in the lockdown of a Kentucky prison last month that houses about 200 Vermont inmates.
Visitors tend to be the biggest suppliers to inmates. But Pallito says about a half-dozen corrections employees are under investigation at any given time for smuggling contraband into prison.
David Bellini is a longtime corrections employee and the chairman of the Vermont State Employees Association’s corrections bargaining unit. Bellini says corrections employees are open to the prospect of employee searches. But he says employees won’t stand for anything that’s overly invasive, or that involve strip searches or pat downs.
Bellini says the state also has to create consequences for inmates that are caught using narcotics. Bellini says opiate narcotics have become the drug of choice inside correctional facilities. Suboxone, a powerful opiate narcotic used to help treat heroin addicts, is particularly heavily trafficked drug. The drug is also called buprenorphine.
“It used to be they tried to smuggle pot in all the time, and then when they banned tobacco it was all about tobacco and tobacco was more valuable than any drug,” Bellini says. “Now it seems to be Suboxone is the drug of choice.”
Sears says the illegal diversion of Suboxone being prescribed to opiate addicts in Vermont has become a narcotics problem in and of itself. He says he’s working on legislation that would keep increase oversight of doctor’s prescribing behaviors, and other measures intended to deter Suboxone diversion.
