 Hi, welcome to town meeting TV. We're here today with a group of folks that are working in the city of Burlington to help make our community a better place in really broad and also very specific ways. So let's just go down and if you can introduce yourselves. That would be great. Hello, Rachel Jolly. She, her pronouns, I'm one of CEDO's assistant directors and I lead up the community justice center. Hi, I'm Sarah Russell and she, her pronouns also and I'm the special assistant to end homelessness for the city of Burlington. Additionally, I am the co-chair of the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance. I'm Scott Hauvik, substance use policy analyst for the city of Burlington and I represent the city on the state's opioid settlement advisory committee and substance misuse prevention council. I use he, him, pronouns. And I'm Lacey, she, her pronouns. I am the community support supervisor with the city of Burlington. I work out of the Burlington Police Department and I am the supervisor of the community support liaison team which works out of CAPE, which is short for crisis advocacy intervention programs. So I would not fault the viewers for not remembering all of the various places that you work. So I want to just start with, you know, when I say we're here you all are here to work in making our community a better place. You're trying to fix some problems, right? And so maybe just a definition for you about what, what's going on out there. I know a lot of folks are saying like, the streets are crazy. It's not safe. Businesses are feeling under, you know, and then people are not getting the housing they need and they're suffering mental health crises and addiction crises. True, not true. Help me understand the problem, help the viewers understand. What's the problem? You want to start that, Sarah? This is like the most obvious problem. Sure. So I think what we're seeing right now is some pretty unprecedented unsheltered homelessness. Prior to the pandemic, we had about 40 or so folks who were unsheltered within the city, within Chittenden County, but primarily based in the city of Burlington. And last summer we saw what we thought was a record high of 80 people outside across Chittenden County. Our most recent data indicates that there are over 200 people, probably closer to 250 people who self-reported that they are living unsheltered or in a place not meant for human habitation. Just in Burlington, in Chittenden County. That is in Chittenden County. Yeah, yeah. So when the state closed the first wave of motels on June 1st is when we really began to see these spikes in folks who were unsheltered. And along with that we also see a lot of really public behaviors. Homelessness is really visible in the city right now. Yeah. Folks want to weigh in on that. Sure. Folks without a place to live, and certainly folks having to live on the streets and as the weather gets colder is a problem, but there's more to it, right? Well, yeah. Essentially kind of when you're houseless you are living what would be inherently private issues out in a public setting. So most of us who have a place to go back to, whatever issues we're dealing with in our own life, we're able to do it in the privacy of our home, in the privacy of our work, wherever it is that we have these, whatever we're trying to deal with. Someone that's homeless is not going to have, not only those places not to go, but you're going to watch them live kind of their lives in real time. And I think for people that haven't had to kind of experience human, watching suffering to the degree that we're kind of having to deal with it right now and the complications that come from it, it can make people feel pretty helpless. And then, especially as a citizen, not knowing what to do or how to do it, and then looking to systems to try to fix those problems, and then the systems aren't responding in the way that we would like them to. And so I think for people that can contextualize the problem, it really isn't about the individual. I think we think about homelessness as being that's the person's problem, and this is a systems issue. This is, we are having our systems aren't responding, they are not pivoting, they are not growing in the way that we need them to, and so that just means that cracks are bigger. And the larger the cracks get within the system, the more people are going to fall into that crack, the more people are going to fall into the public safety system because their needs are not being met anywhere else, and the public safety system is one of the only systems that inherently is just reactive. And what we're experiencing now is the police are saying, well, we don't have the resources to say yes all of the time, and so we're going to say no sometimes, and that causes a degree of distress, and so the only reactive service is really fire, and then they are dealing with their whole situation of they're responding to everything and then again, like they're having to think about resource management because the pressure to just kind of do everything all of the time because we don't have what we need in these other places is becoming too overwhelming. So you've said a lot, and I think specifically the idea of systems and understanding what does that really mean when we talk about systems. You talk about the public safety system. In that case, we're talking about the police, calls to the police, the ability of the police to respond. What are some other systems that you're seeing and maybe some folks can also, can that talk about them? What is the problem? I really appreciate the way Lacey laid it out in terms of the systemic failures. The current existing systems that we have are not able to respond to the scale and scope of the problems that we have now. The Community Justice Center is another part of that public safety system that is mostly in reactive mode as it was set up to do, and our mission is to address the roots and, strive to address the roots and impacts of crime and conflict, and so we do get referrals from the police, from the state's attorney, from the courts, from probation and parole. And inevitably when working with humans, there's going to be conflict. We are meant to be reactive in some ways to address an incident of crime or harm with the parties who have been impacted. What we're seeing is this dramatic change in where the base level is in terms of the parties coming to us. So if somebody is houseless, if they're in the midst of a substance use or mental health crisis, their ability to reflect on and kind of ponder and compare and contrast where they were at the time of this incident of conflict to now is greatly reduced because they're still in crisis. When you're in any form of crisis, you're not necessarily reflecting back. You're not using that part of your brain. You're in a trauma response. And so our work we're seeing dramatically challenged to have any kind of meaningful form of accountability when somebody is really in the midst of crisis. So even our stats on the charges, the referrals that we get from the police department, we've seen a dramatic increase in folks that we cannot even get a hold of. So really we're not able... Is there not because they don't have an address? They don't have an address or they don't have a phone. It's changed in the week since we've gotten the case since the incident happened. We're simply not able to contact folks. Scott, you know, you're here as the... Tell us again the title of your job. Substance Use Policy Analyst. Yeah. So a lot of times I think, you know, as somebody who has a home, who just sees things from sort of the outside, you know, going to and from work, the relationship between substance abuse and houselessness gets kind of conflated, those two things. Can you talk a little bit about from your point of view the problem? What is the problem and this idea of what are the systems that we have in place or not? Sure. To start, certainly you're right that we do hear it a lot that these problems are conflated as though substance use disorder is something that especially impacts housing secure individuals or is for some reason a cause of housing insecurity, which if anything we understand from a systems perspective is more likely to be the inverse that housing insecurity and lack of treatment for mental health conditions lead someone into a substance use disorder. And certainly thinking about a criminogenic understanding of substance use, it becomes really tempting to use that as an out to justify not providing resources for the person we see on the street. Okay. Wait. Put that term when you say criminogenic understanding. So to see it really understanding substance use not as a human condition or experience not as a medical or health condition or experience but really something that is either a moral decision question on if it's a decision or not to some degree and just from the legal perspective. So seeing that someone who is, if you understand it purely from that lens seeing someone using substances and experiencing housing insecurity you might be tempted to say that substance use being a deliberate antisocial decision which I kind of scoff at just because it is so much more complex than that and rarely if ever that simple. It's just really tempting to say that that person is responsibility for improving their situation only lies on them. One thing we've talked about across public safety, public health, housing is increased demand for services particularly emergency response services but not only are we seeing increased demands on under resourced systems but we're seeing situations that we were able to respond to in the past become increasingly complex and challenge the efficacy of models that had once served as well in the past. And when I say that I think about the hub and smoke system Vermont's statewide system of providers for medication for opioid use disorder something that was incredibly effective when we were dealing with a illicit drug use problem or supply that centered on heroin. And since we've transitioned from heroin to fentanyl in the past decade or so that has only meant that medications that were once incredibly efficacious are no longer getting the job done. People are finding it harder to stay into treatment easier to fall out. And when you suffer a relapse it really can pose a toll to your security in a whole lot of other aspects. So yeah. Why is it important for folks to know the details of that? And when I talk about like when I say folks who am I talking about? I'm talking about the general public. I'm talking about people in positions of power and leadership. I'm talking about people that need to make decisions. Why is it important that they know the details of why it's hard to move out of addiction? Oh jeez. It's kind of like asking a fish to describe water. Why is it important to understand? I think one policymaking there is a role for empathy in policymaking especially when you're influencing policies that might impact your friends and neighbors with whom you don't share experiences or have wildly disparate experiences. I think it's incredibly necessary to understand to the greatest degree possible the tolls policy failures can have on individuals. And certainly when understanding the nature of what's the relevancy of understanding what's in the drug supply. For some policy makers who might have the good fortune of being entirely unaffected by substance use disorder or overdose crisis in their personal lives. It's important to understand because you cannot reasonably expect solutions that were tailored to one problem in the past to work as effectively when the problem changes. It's just something that if you don't understand the way in which problems are changing you can't make better investments in more effective solutions. What are some, and I don't know if other folks want to respond to that. I mean the idea of empathy and decision making and in planning and systems planning is interesting. I think it's also important in the way of like as citizens ask all the time like what can I do. And part of it is advocacy. And part of it is not looking, it's knowing that who really has the ability to affect change within certain scopes of systems. Most times in my position I see people advocating to one entity without them realizing that that entity actually doesn't have the control. In other words asking the police. Asking the city to do something. And then the city is dependent upon the state and the state says no but then people want to keep going to the city to say why aren't you doing anything, why aren't you doing anything. When it's like the attempt to do it is there. We are meeting with them, we're asking those questions, we're advocating for it and we're getting told that we're not doing anything. We're asking the city to do something that's not working for our community because of the system. And so to be able to have the public pivot and say to the state or say, or go to the legislators to go to the feds to say this isn't working for our community because of the system. Not because we have people in positions that are hearing you and doing nothing. It is that they are trying to do anything and they're getting a wall. And so when that's the case we're not going to be able to do anything and that's what we do. But then also to go to these other entities to say like you are also part of this and we need you to step up in this issue when it comes to these systems and their failure to actually respond to the needs of our community. One of the pressure, like in terms of that points of advocacy on state and federal systems or dollars is around detox facilities and inpatient treatment for the kinds of drugs that we're seeing now. So again to emphasize Scott's point that the current systems aren't responding to the current landscape of drug use or the mental health needs frankly as well as the houselessness issue. We really don't have a city solution in terms of that or we'll need more as Lacey said. It can start with the city in terms of the reactive day to day but if we want to get beyond that one of the responses really needs to be ideally in the same location a detox facility in a longer term inpatient facility than we currently have. And just contextually sorry I mean just so people have an understanding that like right now typical sort of process for someone detox aside because there really isn't anywhere for people to go detox besides the hospital. There it is you get two weeks and like the only way that you're going to get beyond that two weeks is through fierce personal advocacy of like I don't want to return to where I came from and until I can go to the next step so if I'm there and I'm homeless it is I don't want to leave until I'm going to sober living I don't want to leave until I can find some place to go because they know returning to the street but all you get is two weeks that's all Medicaid will pay for and there has to be routine consistent you qualify in order for them to stay any longer and so if you don't have those skills if you're not able to advocate for yourself you're going to return to the environment that you left and only the strongest of the strongest of the strongest will really be able to make that work and so it's the same with mental health we don't are completely the community-based system is absolutely saturated there is weight lists and that's all there is right now and then we have a massive gap between that and then being inpatient and there's nothing in between we don't have these layers of community-based care we don't have a middle ground where someone can go get stabilized outside of the one Howard Center program and it's 10 beds and again, weight list so it has to do with layers of the care that's needed and all we really have right now is the ground level and the highest level and to get from the ground to the highest you have to be in a significant degree of crisis so talk when we had a little bit of data around homelessness and then there's sort of dancing around I mean there's an existential question about why are country, Vermont Vermont is in such a state of crisis around opiates there's a big existential question around that but what are the numbers around that what is the paint a picture to me what's the story around that how does it affect what we're looking at as a problem if you can? I think the biggest numbers that stand out are just the emergency services responses to overdose reports, overdose incidents in the community and as well as overdose deaths state and nationwide something where we've seen overdose response incidents absolutely explode over the past three years in particular and overdose deaths increasing I think statewide every single year since 2014 when Governor Shumlin used the state of the address to declare the opioid crisis the top public emergency we know that for example the Howard center that is a hub provider for methadone still sees a census count of about a thousand patients but we still have plenty of people for whom have not been stable in the past or have only been exposed or developed an opioid use disorder through use of fentanyl for whom that onboarding right now isn't sufficient or access isn't available or otherwise again other forms of medication we've offered just aren't working at least with current induction maintenance protocols so while we're seeing that treatment providers there hasn't been a drop off in demand for treatment we certainly need more but if anything there's a greater population I think now particularly when it intersects with mental health other mental health conditions or housing insecurity that it's just harder to get your foot in the door Sarah I think what I would say I actually wanted to go back I wanted to lift a couple of things that I heard and one of them was around I think because the issues that we're seeing are so public that they're so visible that we're seeing a decrease in sort of collective empathy for this population and I think that our systems haven't evolved so from a systemic level since the pandemic a lot of things changed we saw social service systems become completely maxed out and need to pivot to not being able to go into a motel room or not being able to serve folks within a congregate setting not being able to have people come into our offices not being able to go into people's homes so we saw a real shift in the way that we had to deliver social services and I also think that now knowing what we do and how many more folks are experiencing homelessness than they were pre-pandemic for example pre-pandemic we had about 220 240 households that were experiencing homelessness our most recent data indicates that there are over close to 780 households now that are experiencing homelessness and there hasn't been this inflow of funding but even if there were agencies trying to identify staff and retain staff and manage that staff and agency infrastructure situation like it's just not possible and so we're asking so much more of an already maxed out system to be able to respond we're seeing wait times of between 6 to 8 weeks before households can be connected with a case manager and even then you run into the issues of like not having an address the phone numbers changed we can't reach out to someone we're working within business hours all of these challenges that are coming up and I think that all of those things are coming together it's just this like loss of collective empathy on the part of the community which I understand when people ask what can they do people ask me that all the time what can I do it's like I educate yourself and maintain empathy and try to build that empathy with your social networks but I think also just the lack of capacity from a service perspective we're still working to catch up on that so we've talked a lot there are mentions and I think it's funny for me that word systems is kind of a jargon word because it means it means a whole lot that is not necessarily transparent to folks that are looking at it so criminal justice system or education system state systems the Burlington police system where do you all fit in like what system do you fit in as a part of and where is the system working well where is the city effectively meeting and what's the room for growth so if you can just talk about it and maybe make it transparent for folks what's the system that you're in I'm connected to I think that our system is sort of like this massive bend diagram there's all these different systems and all of them overlap just a little bit so I think that's how I would kind of explain it I think a place that our system has been really effective is in our outreach programs we have I think increased our capacity with outreach teams as a community here in Chittenden County Lacy's team no longer just one person anymore multiple community support liaisons we have for the city we also are utilizing park rangers in an innovative way to connect with all users of the park so folks who are you know spending the majority of their lifetime in a park or people who are visiting for the day and then we're also partnering with non-service excuse me non-profit service providers like Shamblin Valley Office of Economic Opportunity has an outreach program Howard Center has an outreach program and I think we're doing a good job of connecting those outreach providers to kind of network together that's where I see a strength in our system again outreach isn't a solution to homelessness but it's the first step toward connection for a lot of these for a lot of these folks that are outside and I think that's a place where we're having great success Speaking from the Community Justice Center we're part of the criminal legal system truthfully we're an alternative path we're not the mainstream criminal legal system that believes that punishment is the starting point for wrongdoing or harm causing but we are part of the system in that we get our referrals from the major stakeholders of the system from the police, from the state's attorneys from the courts from DOC and we're funded by most of those so we are set up in an ideal world to respond when it is a voluntary process so we use restorative principles when we do get referrals we're going to be reaching out to the person or people who are responsible for that harm to the impacted parties or victims and to community members who are directly impacted or more often indirectly impacted when there's harm in an ideal world that we are able to look at that incident as an isolated incident or maybe as part of somebody's chronic trauma or ongoing life story but also come together especially with that community accountability because we're not just looking at it just by the individual that made a bad choice or made a harm causing choice but also what were the reasons behind them looking at all parties around the table as whole people rather than as criminals or as labels like offender and just victim but who are we as people coming together to talk about what happened what were they thinking at the time what have they thought about since how can we look at repair and work together in a collaborative way to look at that repair and move forward with thinking not just in the past about punishment for that crime but not thinking in a punitive model in forms of other accountability for asking about what are the needs present and whose obligation is it to meet those needs and not just look at it as that individual obligation but where are we as a community failing in terms of somebody stealing diapers for instance or stealing food or living on the streets and having to make hard choices about where they spent their $3 that day so I think about it as a community response to harm and crime and in the best case scenario that can really work in transformative ways around that table in the current situation when somebody's not stable enough to even respond to a call or to a letter or to outreach to come the system kind of falls apart in that way and you rely while you're part of that criminal justice system and you're part of the city system you rely on other systems for volunteers for networks of support let's talk about that a little bit what happens when those other systems fall apart and what are those yeah I mean in an ideal world the community justice center is moving towards more and more proactivity as Lacy talked about some of our systems are designed to be reactive in a way and in terms of what a community justice center could be moving upstream farther up into the preventative model we do have one staff member who's embedded in one of the Burlington schools to reduce racial disparities among suspensions and expulsions in the conflict assistance program to try and address when there's neighborhood conflict for instance to use mediation or other kinds of conflict coaching to come about a peaceful resolution or a resolution that works for all so hopefully it wouldn't escalate to a crime doing so in that way that's the longer term way I think of getting under that and having not fall apart and I think volunteers are essential part of that and the true community justice center is informed by what's going on in the community and the various resources and networks that our community members live in are a part of who can act on a human level instead of just looking for punishment if we're truly not interested in having something happen again then the response is it could be looking at those needs what were the unmet needs that produced this behavior was it a lack of education was it a lack of meeting practical need and how can our collective connections really respond to that and hopefully even create bonds that will outlast that process and that in an ideal world I feel like the CJC offers 10 different programs actually and one of the common factors that we could look at as an evaluation for success is has the person left with one more connection or one or more connections that they didn't have previously so they're not dependent on these paid staff members or our systems as they're created but how can they create their own system systems of support moving forward Scott is your position I mean you're working within CEDO which is a system inside city government which is interesting and are there other positions similar to yours around the country are there things that you're doing effective and is there more that you need to support the work that you're doing is there more I need to support the work that I'm doing I think I'll skip that one because that one would take too much time I think certainly when talking about substance use specific responses it really depends whether or not my position exists is mostly contingent upon the size of municipality and if that municipality has a dedicated public health already I do sit within CEDO and it's kind of a floating position in so far as I try to serve as a resource to all city departments but when thinking about I suppose what's what's effective or what connections are built going back to the systems question one thing I do in my role is liais with either different levels of government government different boundaries so looking at different states municipalities and then also connecting resources from government to nonprofit providers and so an example of recent success I believe is an agreement drawn up by Burlington Fire the community response team and the Turning Point center of Chitton County which is our local recovery center that will allow for Burlington Fire to make referrals or gather information to build connections for people who are revived from overdose incidents out in the community with recovery coaching and that's incredibly relevant when we're seeing increasing proportion of those victims of overdose incidents out in the field refusing transport to medical services that would just be a transport to the emergency department about the University of Vermont Medical Center but building that connection this is just not to plow through that somebody's in a crisis an overdose situation emergency personnel are called or maybe they've been administered in our can they show up and the next step is taking it in the emergency room or in some cases not right? yep it's up to that person at that point if the acute crisis is over and that person is deemed stable they're not going to be taken of course against their will to the medical center so seeing an increasing proportion of those victims choosing instead to stay within the community continue on their way either access resources or not in following a very acute medical crisis probably not this is just another example of meeting people where they're at something that we hear a lot in our work and just trying to ensure that resources we want people to access are as available and low barriers possible and why I think that's an important success not that I had much to do with it but because it's an example of two agencies or two organizations in our community who are already at complete capacity and bandwidth every single day in terms of the services they're providing taking the time out to collaborate with one another and ultimately I think that's successful reduce burden and some of those demands especially associated with medical emergencies observed out in the community and Lacey I mean you've got one of the toughest systems to talk about in terms of current conversation policing system so I know this is a big question to ask but what's working effectively in your mind with the BPD and what more needs to change what well so you know I think for context and what I do think is working is and I think that like what people again what's going on in the public safety system really is about it really is about system change and it's been because again when you see the social service system and the gaps that are there and then people fall into the public safety system and they fall into homelessness or substance use or crisis with mental health and the police were to respond they you know the police are trained around law enforcement and so but when you have a responsive model where all you do is respond you're responding regardless of what the issue is you're going to go and so that means you are inherently going to be faced with issues that you might have gotten some training on but that is not your expertise that is not where you've spent you know hours upon days of your life working in and so we have asked an awful lot of police officers in terms of the problems that we are asking them to manage same goes with teachers like we're asking them to do way more than they probably ever expected to do so the whole idea around Cape which is the crisis advocacy and invention programs is really looking at how do we do system change with less officers because the demand from this community was we don't want officers to go to every single type of call not that we don't want officers at all but that we don't want them to respond to calls where public safety or enforcement of a law aren't what's driving the call because a lot of times what's coming into the system those two elements public safety and crime are not what's driving the call it's other things and so Cape is really designed to be able to respond to calls that don't have that element of public safety don't have an element of crime but there is still a need and someone is still looking for help and so how can we help them and so the intention of it is to be low barrier meaning that the access in order to get a hold of somebody within Cape is meant to be as easy as possible so you can email, you can call you can reach us through our dispatch then there's also various positions within Cape and we're all housed within the police department which means that we have the ability to respond differently in real time to calls that are falling into the system whether it be the community support liaisons which are the social workers of the city and then there's the community service officers which I don't want to confuse but people should know about because they inherently don't live in Cape but they are the civilian arm of enforcement and they do light enforcement meaning they are not walking around armed with a gun they have the ability to enforce municipal tickets they help with traffic accidents they do kind of this lower level are they identifiable they are identifiable but their uniform is usually pretty casual okay so they go out and again they are like another layer of we don't need an armed officer to deal with this issue however we still have some sort of enforcement so ordinance related enforcement noise you know dogs without leashes those sorts of kind of lower level quality of life issues that still really kind of affect things in the community but again we don't need an armed sworn officer to be the one going out and doing it so they respond to calls as well just in the same way as the social workers do and then within Cape there's also the victim advocate and she's specific kind of to domestic violence and also really like family core issues and then we have a domestic violence prevention officer she's the only officer that lives within Cape and then there is that's it and then myself and then yes thank you I know I'm forgetting Thelma and then we have the community justice position that's embedded in the department and she is the parallel justice specialist and we they specifically work with individuals who have been victims of harm it's not even necessarily victims of crime per se it's just victims of kind of of of harm as a whole within that system and if folks wanted to learn more about that there is a website that kind of goes through both the CJC different programs if your window is smashed out and you need help or you are in a conflict with your neighbor or you want to reach out to the BPD in a different way that is all accessible we don't have a lot of time left and the question I'm going to ask you you're going to groan which is when you're lying about it now you want to reach down into the sort of roots of where this where these crises are coming from or the work that you're doing the problems that you're trying to solve and you could just like kind of pull up one root and say I want to look at this one I want this is really important that if we don't look at this one we're going to just keep being in this cycle of whack-a-mole I got an answer I got an answer you want to for me when I think about that I think about generational trauma and its effects on children we know that from children who experience homelessness are so much more likely to experience homelessness as adults I think that growing up in a home around substance use certainly makes you more predisposed to experience that later on and I think that it's that piece that we look at the family systems experience trauma and then that is just passed down the line I think something that you that I've heard a couple of times both you say and Scott say a little bit and Lacey say is prevention and I think that when we have a system that is so overloaded that we're having to respond to crisis right in front of us it leaves little time to focus on prevention and so from a housing perspective if we're not preventing homelessness from happening then we have this revolving door of like as soon as you house somebody they might be okay for a little while and then if we don't get at those core issues that they've experienced to help them be successful they'll fall right back into homelessness and it's a hundred times harder to get them back into housing and I think that we need to focus our efforts equally on prevention and on crisis response so that we can create a stop in that cycle I think along that line I would say poverty I mean for me generational trauma and generational poverty seem to be two sides of the same coin in my mind and I think a lot of as you have any sense of what it means to be poor then you it's really hard to contextually understand how that affects every aspect of your life how that stress how that evolves into trauma it is interconnected with all of these issues is this idea of just being able to meet your basic needs and having and poverty is going to significantly prevent you from even being able to humor the idea of trying to change your life circumstance if you all you are trying to do is figure out how you're going to pay for something pay for your bus ride to get to work how am I going to pay for food when I it is everything and so to me poverty as long as we kind of allow for our community not to even have the most basic of needs Matt then I don't know how these issues might make them a little bit better we might be able to continue to put band-aids on things as we do as a really as a country but until we really start to address like these very kind of again generational issues where we see the same families cycle through these systems and unless there's a way to kind of intercept that unless there's a way to break that then I you know there will always kind of be this lack of people getting stuck in certain systems especially the public safety system because poverty just does nothing but create instability and how are you going to foundationally work on anything if everything is unstable because you just don't have what you need to live and poverty can be traumatizing it is traumatizing 100% Scott you have a root that you have yeah I mean I so I think a lot of my work focuses on problematic substance use and substance use that relates to medical disorders and chronic conditions and if you accept that substance use is as old as humans are then really what I'm looking at is a much more recent phenomenon if anything from distinctly past from the past 100 years or so of our hesitancy to treat the medical issues that arise from substance use as medical issues and oftentimes it seems so simple as if we just provided medical supervision for incidents of substance use that often relate or result in overdosed mortality people dying we can really effectively reduce that rate of death is that a safe injection site? yeah that's a safe injection site a safe consumption site anything where currently prohibited illicit drug use that's going on in countless unsafe locations in our community can instead be centralized and if it's going to happen anyway happen under the medical supervision in a place where resources are on hand to provide the interventions necessary to keep the person alive it's a hesitancy that's rooted in stigma and a lot of inertia around investments in public safety over time that we can now I think really recognize just aren't tailored to the problem that we're hoping to address so the results we're hoping to see in our communities and Rachel that I have been musing on is challenging the notion of individuality a bit I know that it's kind of central to this country's core Vermont certainly prides itself on the individual notion of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and the strength and will power that an individual can show but I feel like there's a lot to learn from communal cultures around the world where any problem is our problem and it's ours to look at collaboratively and to think about how we contribute to the problem and also how we can address it again the notion of punishment as an effective one size fits all form of accountability I think is really hurting us right now we're the ones being punished ultimately because of the strong notion of an individual being punished for their wrongdoing or harm causing that actually is more of a reflection on the society and the community at large than just on this individual and so we're all feeling the pain from this so I would just want to encourage us to as we age as a country and supposedly evolve and become more civilized I think that's to looking to more ancient cultures starting on this continent the indigenous cultures that do look at any issue as a community issue and one for us to expand our notions of that accountability to looking back at all of us well that's a lot to ruminate on and I think you all for sharing the hard work that you're doing and giving us a little glimpse behind the curtain of how the city is approaching what we're calling a problem in our community that is also really just us living here together and how we're going to all be in community together so I appreciate you taking the time today and thank folks for watching you're watching Town Meeting TV again and if you want to learn more the websites and resources are on the screen for you to look at and have a good day