opioid-map

SEQUIM – Monday’s Sequim City Council meeting featured a packed house and a rowdy crowd, mostly there to oppose the building of a planned opioid treatment center the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe wants to put on a 20-acre site near Costco.

The project, made possible by the State legislature’s approval of a $7.2 million grant, is made of a partnership that includes Olympic Medical Center, Jefferson Healthcare, Forks Community Hospital and Peninsula Behavioral Health, and would eventually provide a broad spectrum of services including mental healthcare.

The campus will be built in two phases: Phase 1 being a Medication Assisted Treatment (or MAT) facility, designed to address the opioid crisis in our area.

Opponents of the project at Monday’s council meeting, which was punctuated by loud shouting and booing, have set up a Facebook page called Sequim Against MAT. Their Mission Statement reads, in part:

“We feel that the MAT clinic poses a risk of increased homelessness and crime in Sequim. We feel that the consortium which is building and operating the clinic should assume responsibility for mitigating future potential harms. In particular, the MAT clinic must not accept homeless people who will stay in Sequim to receive their daily dose. That goes double for people from out of town who will have little choice but to be homeless in light of Sequim’s tight housing market.”

Another opponent put it this way: “THOUSANDS of homeless…will be sent here for treatment. It is an out-patient facility only, so what will the patients be doing for the other 23 hours a day? We fear that they will be loitering, begging, robbing, stealing, burglarizing, and even urinating and defecating on our streets, Costco parking lot, and generally ruining…Sequim.”

We gave the Tribe’s Health Director Brent Simcosky a chance to address their concerns.

“We won’t be serving anybody in the Seattle area or that side of the Sound. It’s just we have more addicts and opioid disorder patients here in the Olympic Peninsula, then people can imagine and we don’t really need to go to Seattle to bring people over. There will be more patients than we can see that just live within 30 miles of Sequim. And you know, we understand the fears that people have but we would like to get the facts out. Phase One will be a 15,000 square foot building, and we’ll ramp up between about a hundred to 200 patients in the first two years. And the way it works is a patient comes in or we transport them in. Let’s say that you lived in a rural area outside of PA and you don’t have transportation. We will come and pick you up, bring you in.  You have an exact set of activities that you must do. When you’re finished, you’re put back on the van or you get back in your car and you go back to where you came from. There’s not going to be any loitering allowed, the DEA will not allow any loitering, we’re not going to allow people to go walk around through downtown Sequim. We understand and appreciate that. We do not want anyone loitering or creating any sort of problem with any businesses or homeowners anywhere in area and they just won’t be allowed in the program if that happens. Period.”

Phase Two of the project, which is not yet funded, is a planned 16-bed inpatient mental health facility that would be operated by Olympic Medical Center.

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