‘This is not just impacting a section of the community’: Local leaders talk fentanyl crisis at roundtable discussion

The first few times staff members at Compassionate Addiction Treatment had to rush out of their Division Street center to administer Narcan to prevent someone from dying of a drug overdose, it was traumatic – the staff would sit down and talk through the experience.

But slowly, it became more common. Now, it’s an almost daily occurrence.

“It has become so normal that we no longer talk about it,” Hallie Burchinal, executive director of CAT, said at a roundtable on fentanyl Monday.

The discussion between health care providers, tribal leaders, first responders and people in recovery was organized by Sen. Maria Cantwell and moderated by Spokane County Health Officer Dr. Francisco Velázquez.

The meeting was part of Cantwell’s statewide listening tour on the fentanyl epidemic.

“We’ve (seen) unbelievable efforts by people in communities to try to make a difference on this issue,” Cantwell said. “We’ve heard also about some of the tools that the community needs, on the treatment side, like figuring out how to get more flexibility about the number of beds available and immediate treatment. That’s a big theme that we’re hearing from everybody: We need immediate treatment.”

Everyone present seemed to agree on the need for that and an overall increase in treatment facilities.

Alissa Helvick, an emergency room advanced registered nurse practitioner at MultiCare Deaconess, told the group the ER is able to help people experiencing detox or following an overdose, but it doesn’t have the capacity to offer treatment beyond stabilization. Most frequently, Helvick will prescribe Suboxone, which wears off, leaving patients in need of further treatment.

With so few treatment facilities in Eastern Washington and hardly any detox beds, Helvick and Burchinal lamented they have few places to refer people entering recovery.

Spokane Fire Chief Brian Schaeffer agreed. Firefighters frequently use Narcan to revive people mid-overdose but have few options for aftercare other than the ER.

“I have no place to send them,” Schaeffer said.

People addicted to fentanyl often want to get sober, but are often bounced between treatment programs due to insurance issues – or can’t even get into treatment in the first place.

Fentanyl is extremely addictive, Velázquez said, and can be found in most drugs. It’s known to be more difficult to quit, he added.

“So it’s not that people don’t want to (get sober), it’s sometimes they can’t,” Velázquez said.

Julie Hinkmyer, program director at Peer Spokane, became addicted to Oxycontin after a sports injury.

She eventually moved on to heroin. She tried rehab and methadone, which is prescribed to help wean people off heroin and other opiates, but struggled to maintain her sobriety.

Her husband was in recovery, too, and then the couple lost their son. Hinkmyer’s husband relapsed.

“He took methamphetamine and it was laced with fentanyl, and I came home and found him dead,” Hinkmyer said. “So I lost my son and husband within, like, a year of each other.”

That profound loss gave her the “tenacity” to keep going and maintain her sobriety. She now helps others through recovery as a peer counselor.

Stephanie Rosell has struggled with addiction for the last 17 years.

When her younger brother died during her senior year of high school, she started drinking.

“I turned to drinking, and of course drinking turned into other things down the road,” she said.

She had a baby at 19 who she let her mother raise, leaving Rosell to sink deeper into addiction.

She began doing meth and then heroin. In 2012, she overdosed on fentanyl-laced heroin “and it scared the crap out of me, so I decided to go to treatment.”

After a period of sobriety, she relapsed. At the end of 2020, she found fentanyl after a friend told her they had been doing it.

“I tried it, and within a week I was in full-blown addiction,” she said.

She worked on her sobriety, but a car wreck left her in immense physical pain that wasn’t being treated by Suboxone, she said.

Then in March 2022, she found out she was pregnant. Rosell tried to maintain her sobriety through medication assisted treatment, but struggled to find supportive health care professionals.

Her baby was born exposed to drugs.

That’s when she found Maddie’s Place, a newly opened facility that takes care of addicted babies and their mothers.

“We come alongside of our moms and meet them in a nonjudgmental way,” said Kim Dunham, director of family advocacy at Maddie’s Place. “We welcome them into our facility and we care for them and their baby together. We believe that mothers are the best medicine for their babies if they can be there.”

The nonjudgmental care was exactly what Rosell needed. She no longer felt like a number in the system, and she didn’t fear being kicked out if there was an issue with her Medicaid.

Rosell has stayed sober and now helps others at Maddie’s Place.

Leaving rehab early because of issues with Medicaid is a common problem, Rosell said. Burchinal echoed her concern.

Neither Maddie’s Place nor Compassionate Addiction Treatment are reimbursed for most of their services and rely largely on donations.

The roundtable ended with more problems than solutions, but agreement on what many of the key issues are.

In Spokane County, 250 people died of drug overdoses last year, and 147 of them involved fentanyl. The county saw a 425% increase in fentanyl-related overdoses from 2020 to 2022, according to the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Just a small amount of fentanyl can be fatal, Velázquez said, mentioning a case in which a teenage boy died after taking what he thought was Adderall.

“This is not just impacting a section of the community,” he said. “This is an issue for everyone in the community. It doesn’t matter who you are.”