YARMOUTH Coalition battles addiction

A group of Yarmouth residents is working to increase awareness and reduce drug addiction in the Mid-Cape.

The Yarmouth Police Community Advisory Team Drug Awareness Committee works with residents, local clergy and the Barnstable County Department of Human Services, among others, to educate the public about addiction. The committee was formed by the Yarmouth Police Department, and is working on becoming a recognized town committee. President Chris Greeley says the group recently finalized its charge statement, one of the steps toward becoming a town committee.

Greeley is a licensed mental health counselor, and has worked as a coordinator at a hotline in Sharon, and as the director of student services in two Massachusetts towns. The Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District has a partnership with Gosnold of Cape Cod, which helps school officials to intervene with students if it’s discovered they have a drug problem, and Greeley is hoping this can expand to middle school-aged children.

“It’s interesting because these issues run across all communities everywhere,” she said.

“One of the things we identified was that people seem to think marijuana and alcohol isn’t a big deal – it is a big deal.” Also on the list of drugs that are within reach of kids are prescription painkillers, and “spice,” also known as synthetic marijuana.

“There’s a certain group of kids we’re trying to create an environment for that alcohol and drug use isn’t cool,” Greeley said.

The crux of this strategy is creating social pressure not to use drugs by highlighting the majority of kids who stay away from drugs, as opposed to focusing on the relatively small number of students who are using.

“The middle school initiative is educational, it also might be that you start to turn up kids who already have issues,” Greeley said. “What we’re really looking at is creating an environment in which kids understand this isn’t cool, this has consequences.”

One Cape Cod mother, who asked to remain nameless, has two sons who have struggled with addiction. The older son, 26, is currently in jail, thus sober, and the other son, 24, overcame his addiction and is now on the West Coast working with a faith-based recovery group, helping people who are struggling with drugs and alcohol. Their mother attends Learn to Cope meetings, held weekly at the Yarmouth police station, where parents and other family members of people struggling with addiction gain knowledge and support from experts, as well as people who have been down that road.

“I’ve been going for two years, and I first learned about them when [her older son] overdosed at my house and the Yarmouth police came.”

She said her older son has been using drugs –as far as she knows – since he was 17, while her younger son started using at 20 for about a year before he voluntarily went to rehab. Her older son was last clean when he was incarcerated following a raid on a friend’s house. He was out on probation when he was arrested again with opiates and jailed again.

“Four years ago I stood in front of a Barnstable court judge in tears begging him not to put [him] in jail.”

The next time around, she was begging the judge to lock him up, and she wasn’t the only one. “He knows that he’s where he needs to be to get clean. At his sentencing he actually stood in front of the judge and said 'I need to be in jail.'”

She said that going to Learn to Cope meetings and hearing other parents talk about their experiences has helped to relieve her of some of the guilt she feels over her sons’ addiction.

“I think my biggest thing I learned is I absolutely thought it was all my fault. I learned through them that it’s not my fault,” she said. “The enabling, the guilt, learning again that no is a love word; that if you say it you’re not a bad person.”

She had to learn how to say "no you can’t live here," and "no I won’t support you financially" with her older son. “A perfect example is ‘I need $20 for gas’…I’ve learned now that $20 doesn’t go to gas.”

She says she’s grateful for Narcan, noting it’s saved her older son’s life five times.

“[He] would not be here on this earth if it wasn’t for Narcan,” she said. “He was in the emergency room. His friends dropped him in the emergency room waiting room unresponsive and blue.”

Undeterred by almost dying, he used the next day, underscoring the brutally tenacious nature of heroin addiction.

Narcan training is available at the weekly Learn to Cope meetings. “It needs to be given out because we’re saving lives,” said Greeley, noting that the possibility that people are abusing Narcan so they can continue to abuse heroin is real, but the price of getting rid of it would be too high to bear. “It needs to be there so we don’t have people dying.”

Learn more

Learn to Cope meetings are held at the Yarmouth police station off Higgins Crowell Road in West Yarmouth Tuesdays at 7 p.m.