Jennifer Blankenship-Douglas and Leanora Barton at the Bettye Davis Adult Re-entry Center in Anchorage. They both had to leave Sitka to get the proper treatment for their addictions. (Brielle Schaeffer/KCAW photo)

While more attention is being brought to solve the state’s drug problems, proper services have always been hard to get in more remote areas. Detox facilities are not available in many communities like Sitka. And with the use of harder drugs such as heroin and meth on the rise, the absence of those services is making it harder for those who need help to get it.

Downloadable audio.

I met with Jeff Arndt in his bright living room, overlooking Sitka Sound. He runs a private practice in Sitka and specializes in substance abuse counseling.

“My name is Jeff Arndt I’m a licensed professional counselor, that’s LPC and Master addiction officer, MAC.”

The treatment system in Alaska is a quagmire. Arndt says addicts have to get assessments from the state before they can be placed in treatment, which is necessary, but can take several months. And after the assessments, it can still take a while to get into an inpatient or outpatient program.

“There’s just this huge pool of people out there who I don’t want to say they don’t have nowhere to go because there are options but in terms of residential treatment they don’t have much of anywhere to go and they can’t get there quickly even if they decide they want to,” he said.

Misconceptions of addiction also hurt the situation. Arndt says in many cases it’s not a matter of willpower or stopping cold turkey. Some addicts cannot stop doing drugs without a major intervention or disruption.

“I think some people truly do have the disease of drug addiction,” he said. “And to scorn or feel contempt for someone like that it’s like ‘Wow, you have cancer, man, you’re pitiful, you shouldn’t have had that happen to you. Even in the medical and counseling profession there is quite a bit of that.”

Detoxing , or the process of coming off a drug, can be scary and dangerous. People can die from the process if they are not closely monitored, like what happened to 24-year-old Kellsie Green, who died from a heroin withdrawal in an Anchorage jail earlier this year. At 80 lbs., her death certificate cites malnutrition, dehydration, renal failure, and heart dysrhythmia.

Marita Bailey is the clinical director of Sitka Counseling and Prevention Services. There is no formal, medical detox program in Sitka. Sitka Counseling does have a low-intensity residential treatment program. Bailey says clients here are often 20 to 30 days sober already before receiving one of the facility’s 12 beds, which means they had to detox and start treatment somewhere else. Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium also offers an intensive outpatient program for substance abuse, but wait times are still several days.

“We know in this field in substance use field someone doesn’t want to wait six months to get an assessment and then get treatment if your motivation is high today you want to serve that person as close to today as possible,” Bailey said.

This gap — the lack of acute care for drug addiction — may have cost at least one Sitkan her life, according to Erika Burkhouse. Her sister, Lael Grant, disappeared in 2012. Grant was addicted and deeply connected to Sitka’s drug culture. Her death was ruled a suspected homicide. Burkhouse convinced Grant to seek treatment during an intervention a year before she disappeared, but the window closed quickly.

“There are so many different things that need to be done in order for a person to be successful. It can’t just be detoxing and then you’re done it doesn’t work that way unfortunately,” she said.

And for those who do manage to dry out on their own, the math problem remains: there are more people in need than the twelve beds in Sitka can serve. Marita Bailey says that the uncertainty of the state’s budget could mean even longer waits.

“It’s a challenge, we’re going to have to make accommodations when the budget cuts finally come down and we know what we’re facing but we’re gonna keep providing services at the highest capacity that we can that’s pretty much what all the other providers across the state are looking at,” she said.

The Alaska Legislature did pass a law this session that makes it easier to access Narcan, a drug that reverses heroin overdoses. And the state has created the Alaska Opioid Policy Task Force to come up with better solutions but budget cuts mean there is less money to pay for them. The state recently applied for a federal grant to pay for opioid-specific and medically assisted treatment in Southeast and Anchorage.

While those are steps in the right direction, Erika Burkhouse believes that it’s still not enough. But perhaps nothing can be when you’ve lost a loved one to addiction.

“We still don’t have closure,” she said. “We still don’t know what happened. The investigation is still ongoing but it’s really at a standstill.”

Burkhouse says nobody should have to go through what her family has experienced. She hopes Alaskans keep talking about the addictions friends and neighbors battle every day.

This is part two of a two-part series. Listen to the first part here. 

Lael Grant (Image from “Help Find Lael Grant” Facebook page)

For all its prevalence in Alaskan communities, drug addiction can be a difficult health care problem to manage. Proper treatment depends on timing and access to services, which aren’t always available in small-town Alaska. Limited options mean it can be hard to beat addiction at home — forcing some people to leave all they know to find the help they need.

Downloadable audio.

Thirty-three-year old Lael Grant was last seen in a Sitka grocery store in the early morning of October 15, 2012. Despite an intensive search she has never been found. Last summer, a Sitka jury declared her dead.

Her family believes Grant’s death was due in part to her drug addiction. She was using meth at the time of her disappearance.

Erika Burkhouse is Grant’s sister. When her mom called her in October of 2011 she knew there was a serious problem. Burkhouse flew from her home in Juneau to Sitka for a family intervention.
“And I hadn’t seen her for a while and I realized she was so thin, she was incredibly, incredibly thin,” Burkhouse said. “She looked absolutely awful. I took one look at her and burst into tears …That’s when I talked to her about her addiction and her use. It was at that point in time I just knew–we need to get you help or you’re going to end up dead.”

The two sisters sat together in her trailer and talked for two hours. Grant was at first angry, then she admitted she needed help. But they couldn’t coordinate a medical detox in Sitka. Burkhouse considers this moment a crossroads.

“The window of opportunity leaves quickly,” she said. “You have somebody who is addicted and they admit that they have a problem and right then at that point in time you have to give them the help that they need. So we missed that. Within a couple hours she was back to being defensive and not admitting anymore that she has a problem. We lost the opportunity, which is unfortunate, it was about a year later that she went missing.”

The right kind of treatment can be effective. But more often than not people need to leave home to get it.

Jennifer Blankenship-Douglas and Leanora Barton at the Bettye Davis Adult Re-entry Center in Anchorage. (Brielle Schaeffer/KCAW photo)

“Hi, this is Leanora, Leanora this is Brielle, Nice to meet you.”

I met up with Jennifer Blankenship-Douglas and Leanora Barton at the Bettye Davis Adult Re-entry Center in Anchorage.

“We grew up together in Sitka years ago.”

Both women got hooked on drugs in Sitka. They started at a young age huffing paint or smoking weed, drinking alcohol, partying in the woods. Their drug addiction caused them to lose custody of their children. And they both had to leave Southeast to get the treatment they needed.

“You have to leave everything and everyone you know and go someplace faraway like I did,” she said. “I was living in Ketchikan and had to come all the way to Anchorage to get treatment. Any person who knows and truly wants recovery knows 30 days is not enough at all. It took me 20 something years to create my problem and sit in it it’s going to take me more than 30 days to get over it.”

After an arrest last year on felony charges for possession with intent to sell meth, she could opt for treatment instead of jail. But after one month waiting for a treatment bed to open up, she went to talk to a counselor at the Ketchikan Indian Community, which has an outpatient substance abuse program.

“It finally got to the point and she was like, ‘What are your plans?’” she said. “And I said, ‘My plans are I’m going to use.’ And she’s like what I thought you wanted to go to treatment and I said, ‘I do. I don’t want to use but that’s what my plans are looking like real quick. The only people who want to have anything to do with me are drug addicts.’”

Blankenship-Douglas got a lucky break. She was able to get a one of the 42-beds at The Salvation Army Clitheroe Center, finished the treatment program, and then transferred to the Bettye Davis Re-entry Center, a halfway house. And that’s where her story and Barton’s intersect again.

Jennifer Blankenship-Douglas and Leanora Barton at the Bettye Davis Adult Re-entry Center in Anchorage. (Brielle Schaeffer/KCAW photo)

“Having a friend like Jennifer is just amazing. I couldn’t have done it without her,” Barton said.

Barton had been posting on Facebook about her struggles with a meth addiction and subsequent homelessness, crashing on park benches and friend’s couches. She’d been in-and-out of rehab nine times already but this time Barton was ready to get clean. Blankenship-Douglas reached out and got her to come to the halfway house. But before Barton moved in she wanted to sober up. She says a family friend in Metlakatla gave her money to rent a hotel for a week to detox. When she started living at the center she was nine days clean.

“Two or three days after I moved in here they found a lady frozen to a bench here in Anchorage,” she said. “That could have been me because that’s how I was living.”

The two go to Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings almost daily.

“Some meetings you hear what you need and some meetings you don’t that’s the beauty and we keep coming back,” Blankenship-Douglas said. “Because if you don’t hear what you need today you might tomorrow. And if you don’t tomorrow you might the next day. That’s where we get our hope is hearing the stories of other addicts and hearing their successes their trials their tribulations all that stuff helps us to move forward.”

In Alcoholics Anonymous, members celebrate their birthdays as the day of their last drink. Barton’s sobriety birthday is Nov. 6, 2015. Blankenship-Douglas has been sober now for 14 months, the longest ever in her adult life. Her birthday is April 1, 2015.

“Everyday that I’m given clean and sober is another blessing,” Blankenship-Douglas said. “I really believe if I would’ve stayed in Sitka it wouldn’t have happened.”

Barton has to wait on assessments from the state before she can be placed in a treatment program in Anchorage. This process can leave Alaskans waiting for weeks, even months, which is a long window when you’re struggling with addiction. Barton applied in November and hasn’t heard back.

Addiction is a small community in rural Alaska. Blankenship-Douglas and Barton knew Grant. They did drugs with her. And their stories could have had similar endings. But they didn’t because they were able to get help.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about Lael and if I can honor her memory in any way it’s by staying clean,” Blankenship-Douglas said.

They both feel like they owe that to her in their recovery.

If you or anyone you know is struggling with drug addiction or abuse, get help. The number to call is 888-906-4538.

This is part one of a two-part series. Listen to the second part here.