Solara Salazar, a director of Cielo Treatment Center, which serves young adults in Portland, now receives about 20 inquiries a day about rehab services. “And the majority of them we can’t help,” she said.
Cielo offers outpatient therapy and sober housing. That is great for people who have already begun managing their addictions, but Ms. Salazar, who survived addictions to meth, OxyContin and fentanyl, keeps hearing from those in acute crisis who need a bed in a residential program right away.
She gets pleas from people leaving hospital detox, who have not yet gone through inpatient rehab. Oregon’s Medicaid patients can wait months for a treatment bed, she and others said.
“You just can’t skip a step and expect people to be successful,” she said. “We have a really low success rate that way.”
“I talked to a woman the other day who’s living in her car, and she was sobbing and crying and so desperate for treatment. I’m trying to give her some hope and I say, ‘Just keep trying and you’re going to make it,’ but I know that’s a lie. She’s not pregnant, so she doesn’t meet the benchmark for an immediate bed. And I’m going to tell her she has to call every single day for four months and then maybe she’ll get a bed?”
There's no way to help people without truly helping people. We can't just try decriminalization without any proper social services and say "welp that didn't work, let's jail them all." Criminalizing drugs is not the way to cure a society, but writing tickets without helping people just leaves people desperate on the streets.