Health/healthcare: The opioid crisis in Tennessee
From the Times, today: A remote rural county (Carter) in Tennessee near the North Carolina / Virginia border is teaching children as young as six how to use Narcan in nasal spray form under the auspices of the Carter County Drug Prevention Coalition.
Like much (most) of Appalachia, Carter County (pop. 56,000) has been devastated by opioid use; nearly 60 people have died there of overdoses since 2014.
Now nurses, nurse-practitioners and others are carrying out teaching sessions in a program initiated by the county health department. Since 2017, nearly 600 children have been trained – some of them by their peers, in fact.
It isn’t an easy task, though: “But in a region where socially conservative attitudes prevail — and addiction is often seen as a sin — health workers have encountered strong opposition from residents, school boards and police officers who consider Narcan to be a waste of resources and the training inappropriate for children.
“Drug prevention educators in eastern Tennessee said many schools and some counties have rejected their requests to teach harm reduction training in class, or to allow them to distribute Narcan to students and parents on school grounds.”
So most training is done outside schools, at community events, tailgate parties, babysitting training classes for children (many of whom care for younger siblings), the public library, and even McDonald’s. Only 3 schools in the state’s 8 eastern counties allow onsite training.
That children this young need to be taught how to reverse an opioid overdose is tragic.
But that someone is teaching them how to do it – that’s heroic.
Environmental Injustice
Focus in this long-form piece is on Little Village, a neighborhood five miles southwest of Chicago’s Loop. Of its 74,000 residents, 85% are Latino.
There’s an incredible local environmental group called the “Little Village Environmental Justice Organization” (LVEJO) attempting to obtain some degree of environmental justice for residents.
Here’s some of what they deal with:
– A mayonnaise factory with a multitude of tractor-trailers loading up and driving in – out all day, every day
– The mayonnaise factory sits across the street from a school and is a continuing source of noise and air pollution caused by diesel fumes – there’s a strong link between fumes and asthma
– a coal plant shuttered (thanks to community activism) in 2012 which sits on 70 acres of land; “But the celebration is now over as new developers, aided by a nearly $20 million tax break, are in the process of tearing the plant down to build a one-million-square-foot e-commerce distribution facility. The developers promise 360 construction jobs and 178 permanent jobs.”
(note: so, tons more diesel fumes, sound pollution – and if previous examples are any indication, something like 200 construction jobs short-term, and maybe 100 permanent ones)
– “La Villita Park, which by itself is a 21-acre urban paradise for play and picnics. It was developed over a remediated Superfund site polluted by the manufacture and storage of coal tar, asphalt, and roofing products from 1911 to 1982. The contamination bedeviled nearby residents in rain runoff onto their sidewalks and lawns. Complaints to state and federal regulators led to both cleanup and community engagement as to its next use.
But: ” Directly across the street from La Villita is a fenced-off area blocking access to a canal contaminated with heavy metals. A City of Chicago sign reads in both Spanish and English: ‘Discharges may contain bacteria that can cause illness.'”
(note: residents had to fight to get the sign posted.)
– Little Village’s high school sits near a packaging plant; sometimes the odors it emits are so bad that the school’s sports teams have to move practices elsewhere – or cancel them altogether.
On to the bigger picture of environmental justice, which advocates insist must be a core principle of the Green New Deal:
… current (and past) “policies subject marginalized low-income communities and communities of color to yet deeper levels of disproportionate neglect. Many studies show that such communities are far more likely than wealthier, white neighborhoods to live in close proximity to incinerators, heavy traffic zones, and industries handling toxic chemicals, spewing asthma-triggering and brain-damaging fumes.”
Statistical interlude:
– 24.2% of blacks, who form 12.7% of the U.S. population, live within a half-mile of a brownfield site (i.e. a toxic – polluted site whose re-use/development poses special challenges)
– 26.1% of Latinos, who form 18.1% of the population, live within a mile of a Superfund site (i.e. where toxic materials – pollutants have been dumped out in the open).
On to Waukegan, 42 miles north of the downtown area of Chicago on Lake Michigan:
– a medical-equipment sterilizing plant that emits ethylene oxide:
“Residents there are fighting for much tighter emissions controls on a medical-sterilizing plant because of its use of carcinogenic ethylene oxide (EtO). They are particularly angry because protests in the Chicago suburb of Willowbrook forced the closing of another sterilizing facility.
“But Willowbrook is mostly white and Asian American. Waukegan is much more heavily Latino and African American. A bill to ban EtO use in densely populated areas recently passed the Illinois House but has so far stalled in the Senate. The Chicago Tribune reported that a bipartisan coalition forced the shuttering of the Willowbrook plant, but there has been no kumbaya encore for Waukegan residents, who say both the state and federal departments of environmental protection are moving too slowly on their toxic pollution.”
– a coal plant still in operation which is polluting the groundwater with coal ash.
– a Superfund site, the legacy of an asbestos plant
Note: “Waukegan’s waterfront is plagued with four Superfund sites from a history of heavy manufacturing and energy production involving asbestos, coke, solvents, and PCBs.”
Full circle back to Little Village:
“…part of the anger is that activists have long been planning what could replace polluted sites. Three years ago, they commissioned a study with the nonprofit Delta Institute to envision the transformation of the area’s many remaining brownfield sites. The study said the contaminated areas could ultimately be repurposed as indoor urban farms, composting facilities, commercial kitchens, street vendor sanitizing and storage, more green space, a water taxi dock, light retail plazas, and recreation fields specifically for people with physical challenges.
“Yet, city politicians green-lighted the massive distribution center with a $19.7 million tax break, even though a Natural Resources Defense Council mapping of Chicago last year found that Little Village already shoulders the highest burden of bad air quality in the city.”
The Green New Deal needs to incorporate environmental justice principles – of doing no further harm to already-harmed neighborhoods and communities, of repairing and restoring what can be restored – from the get-go.
“The holistic thinking of the environmental justice community has been embodied in the Equitable & Just National Climate Platform, signed by more than 200 organizations and EJ leaders. The platform says that any meaningful climate agenda must ‘result in real benefits at the local and community level, including pollution reduction, affordable and quality housing, good jobs, sustainable livelihoods, and community infrastructure.’”
Justice / Injustice: Censorship in prison libraries
The libraries subject to the most censorship in the U.S. are those located in prisons.
In January 2019, officials at the Danville Correctional Facility (IL) censored around 200 books and took them off the shelves of an in-prison college program.
Much of the censorship (book-banning) appears arbitrary:
“…while censorship guidelines vary in different prison systems, the restrictions ‘are often arbitrary, overbroad, opaque, [and] subject to little meaningful review.'”
Examples:
“In Kansas, state prisons don’t allow Angie Thomas’ young adult novel, The Hate U Give, or Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye — but they do allow Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
“Texas prisons have censored Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which won a Pulitzer Prize; New Hampshire bars Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones; and Florida has censored multiple books about learning Arabic, Japanese and American Sign Language.”
Among those books most commonly banned are those which deal with race and black history – the justification being that such books could cause disruption.
But in fact:
“Denying incarcerated people broad access to reading materials doesn’t just interfere with their education.”
“‘We’re depriving prisoners of materials that they desperately want and need to affirm their humanity, to help them rehabilitate themselves, to occupy their minds and their hearts while they’re in prison,’ she says.” (Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom).
Illinois, to its credit, has changed the way it bans books in its state prisons. There is now a committee which takes decisions for the entire state system – and a new, published policy in place to guide such decisions.
Random but distressing detail: Florida has banned language-learning books for Arabic, Japanese, and American Sign Language.
Random but useful detail: For every $1 spent on education of an incarcerated individual, the state saves $5 on reduced recidivism.
Justice/Injustice: Norwegian justice or, it doesn’t have to be like this
And now for something inspiring and uplifting on the criminal (in)justice front.
Oregon corrections officer Toby Tooley was sent to Norway for professional development with a group of colleagues through a group called “Amend.”
Tooley, who has responsibility for the death row, mental health, and solitary confinement units at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, was most drawn by what he learned at Ila Detention and Security Prison, outside Oslo, which had a mental health unit.
The mantra at Ila?
“They told us they break the cycle of aggressive behavior and isolation by treating every day as an opportunity to start over and meet the men where they’re at. The day before, you’ve exhausted every method of making their day better, but the next morning, you start over, asking yourself: What can we do to give that person a better day?”
Tooley felt that what he and his colleagues had learned could be put into practice in a modest way – they couldn’t, of course, recreate the staff-to-prisoner-ratio of Norway (1:1), or suddenly make prisons look like college campuses as they do there – with one of his unit’s most difficult prisoners, “Mr.G.”
They painted a rec room in a tropical-seacoast motif and brought Mr. G there – they began speaking with him, asking him what he’d enjoyed doing before: lo and behold, he loved to draw. So they made it possible for him to decorate the walls of his cell. They discovered he played the guitar, so they made the prison’s guitar available to him.
His acting-out ceased; his hours among the general population increased significantly; he goes to art class and movie class, where inmates use film to discuss conflict resolution approaches.
It’s pretty amazing what treating someone like a human being can accomplish.
Education: Sending your child to public school
This thoughtful piece – which is not new – came up on our Twitter feed this morning. It’s worth rereading – or reading, in our case.
Written by a woman who had been home-schooled in a profoundly Christian environment, it reflects on the meaning of Christianity’s core message within the context of public schooling, which the author had been taught to call “government schools.”
She encountered plenty of opposition from her friends:
“When I was making my own decision about school, well-meaning friends told me they ‘loved their children too much to send them to the local school.’ People made comments how they could never ‘sacrifice’ their children for their idealism.”
(note: you don’t have to be profoundly religious – they’re employed by well-off parents of no particular religious beliefs at all who oppose re-zoning and school integration – the so-called “NIMBYS” – all the time.)
Here’s what she realized:
” Today, the children of this country do not have access to an equal quality of education. A disproportionate amount of the children affected are kids of color and kids living in poverty. So when another middle-class family opts out of the public school system, my heart is grieved. Inequality in our public education system is directly related to our proximity to the schools who are the most in need. The truth is that school inequality is not a hot-button issue for most Christians because we do not send our kids to schools where these issues matter. We have segregated ourselves away, and the impact has been monumental. While the ability to choose how to educate our children is important, I also believe that the responsibility to our neighbor is a cornerstone of our faith, and should have a much bigger role in our discussion regarding public schools.”
She sent her daughter to a low-rated (1/10), high-poverty (98% qualify for free lunch) school with many immigrant children (26 languages spoken); her daughter is thriving, and she feels she made the right decision.
“There is no place in this world where God’s presence cannot be found, and there is no child who does not belong to God. When we truly start living and believing like this, then I believe our choices on education will be guided by our love for all of our neighbors.”
Matthew 22:39:
“And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Notes:
One of the most impressive public-school support movements in the country is the Texas Pastors for Kids organization (which has expanded into other states as well).
One of the New York Times’ most distinguished writers, Nikole Hannah-Jones, wrote an extended essay on a similar decision to send her own daughter to a high-poverty, high-minority school in Brooklyn. The core argument of her essay, although missing the religious underpinnings seen here, hinges on justice, equality, and respect.