Police Chief Stops Arresting Opioid Addicts, Offers Help Instead – Crime & Addiction PLUMMET
Crime is down 40 percent in a North Carolina town where police began offering help and recovery options to drug addicts, instead of throwing them in jail.
By Jay Syrmopoulos
TheFreethoughtProject.com
July 26, 2017
Nashville, NC – A police chief in a small eastern North Carolina town, Chief Thomas Bashore, in collaboration with town manager Hank Raper, began a program — using compassion instead of violence — known as the HOPE initiative that is both saving lives and lowering crime.
Nashville, North Carolina, a town of 5,400 offers a unique program to help addicts recover, rather than continue the cycle of crime and addiction, by allowing addicts to turn themselves into police with their drugs and paraphernalia, without being thrown in a cage.
Instead of them facing arrest, they get help getting into a program to fight addiction.
Thomas Spikes, 24, has battled addiction since before he was a teenager, and credits Bashore with saving his life by putting him on a path to recovery from the deadly scourge of opioid addiction.
“He saved my life for sure,” he said. “I owe a lot to him and the program.”
As opioid deaths continue to rise dramatically across the United States, replacing car accidents as the number one cause of unintentional deaths, the state of North Carolina has seen a more than 340 percent increase in opioid deaths from 2010 to 2016.
“There’s no clear characteristic of what a heroin or opioid addiction looks like,” Raper told CNN. “It’s not a white problem, it’s not a black problem, it’s not a Hispanic problem, middle class, working class, upper class. It affects all peoples of all walks of life.”
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