4/30/09
Nellie Manzanares was in Rio Arriba County Magistrate Court again last week. Her 20-year-old grandson, Anthony Manzanares, sat in an orange jumpsuit at the County jail and was being arraigned over video camera for violating his probation on a 2007 drunk-driving conviction.
Anthony Manzanares has a thick court file, including an arrest in January on aggravated assault charges. Nellie Manzanares said she couldn’t afford to bond him out this time, and she wouldn’t do it even if she had the money.
“I made the mistake of taking them out the other times, and I wish I hadn’t,” Manzanares said. “Now he needs to stay in there.”
By “them,” Manzanares is referring to Anthony and Willie, another of her grandsons. Manzanares said she and her husband adopted the two boys in 1993 when their mother was killed.
They began using drugs about two years ago, and ever since she’s been paying tickets and bench warrants and trying to get them into a long-term drug treatment program, she said. The longest either has lasted in any given program is about two weeks, she said.
“They’re either thrown out or they just leave,” Nellie Manzanares said.
Rio Arriba has a handful of local programs that will take addicts and attempt to reform their lives — including Delancey Street in Ohkay Owingeh, and Victory Outreach and Rock Christian Fellowship in Española.
But those programs don’t have doctors on staff to actually detox addicts. Instead, the programs ask participants to admit themselves once they’re already detoxed and medically cleared.
That’s a major obstacle, because addicts who are dependent on opiates suffer massive withdrawal symptoms. Unless those symptoms are managed by a doctor, addicts simply have to bear them.
“That’s what the majority of them can’t seem to do,” Nellie Manzanares said. “From what I hear, withdrawal, if you go cold turkey, it’s pretty bad.”
Edward Dunaway, a community health worker for El Centro Family Health in Española, said heroin withdrawal is like having the flu, times 10.
“The symptoms are horrible — vomiting, diarrhea, shakes, elevated heart rate,” Dunaway said. “That’s why it’s hard for them to kick opiates. It’s the fact of getting sick.”
The best option, then, is supervised medical detox.
But the only residential detox facility in the County, Hoy Recovery, stopped providing medical detox in 2006. They now offer detox only for alcohol addiction.
“There’s nothing available,” longtime drug and alcohol counselor Danny Jaramillo said. “There’s no services for the people that have the highest death rate in the nation. Where do we go?”
Manzanares said her grandson Anthony did a stint at the Santa Fe Recovery Center just before his arrest. But the Center’s executive director, Dr. Yolanda Briscoe, was careful to point out that her clinic provides social detox — not medical detox.
For medically supervised detox, patients have to go to the state-run Turquoise Lodge in Albuquerque, Briscoe said.
Patients seeking inpatient rehabilitation services often wait weeks or months.
“If you get in within a few weeks, you’re lucky,” Española resident Manuel Gutierrez, 26, said. “Mostly it’s months. Turquoise Lodge, everywhere. If it wasn’t for Suboxone, I’d be using again.”
El Centro has an outpatient program to prescribe Suboxone, a non-addictive drug which binds to the body’s receptor sites and waylays withdrawal symptoms. Doctors set a person’s correct dosage as withdrawal symptoms set in, and then patients take the drug for a year to 18 months, Dunaway said.
Dunaway said the program is currently helping over 100 clients, including those addicted to prescription painkillers, but slots are limited and Suboxone is extremely expensive. Doctors must go through special training before they can prescribe the drug, and currently there are just three main providers, Dunaway said.
“It’s kind of tight right now,” Dunaway said.
Magistrate Judge Joe Madrid, who arraigned Manzanares April 22, said he feels sorry for families but there’s not much he can do until a person is convicted. Even then, sentencing may not work. The probation requirements that Anthony Manzanares violated included drug assessment and treatment, and he never fulfilled the requirement.
“We need something in the Española area that’s here,” Madrid said. “A long-term program that’s a lockdown program.”
Manzanares said she’s just frustrated, and tired of calling 100 numbers and getting no help for her grandsons.
“What do you do to stop ‘em, other than getting on your knees and begging the government to open up some places for these kids?” Manzanares said.