Prince George’s County officials have yet to build a residential substance abuse recovery clinic and will continue to rely on a private provider and resources outside the county as a six-year state-brokered agreement to send many substance abusers to a Montgomery County clinic comes to an end.
Several years ago, as Prince George’s County’s population boomed and the number of people seeking relief from their drug habits rose, the county couldn’t keep up and as the county didn’t have a residential clinic of its own, the state stepped in and sent roughly $200,000 a year to Montgomery to house many Prince George’s abusers in the Avery Road Treatment Center, officials from both counties said.
As many as 60 residents a year slept in the beds reserved for Prince George’s residents at the Avery Road clinic, Megan Westwood, the clinic’s director, said.
But when the fiscal year ends July 1, the state-set deadline for funding Prince George’s recovery clinic will take effect, and residents will either be sent to a private clinic in the county or to clinics in either St. Mary’s or Calvert counties, Candice Cason, Prince George’s director of addiction-recovery services, said.
Over the years, “we’ve cobbled together services in various places … now we’re expanding in those locations,” Cason said.
Sending substance abusers out of county isn’t optimal, she said; they’re taken away from their families and their friends. Patients also are farther from the county’s post-clinic recovery network, often leaving them to get help from the counties where they end up, and sometimes they just stay there.
“If they’re out of the county, it starts to get easier to look for a job near the clinic … a large proportion end up staying there,” Cason said.
She said she isn’t sure how many never return, but it’s something the Prince George’s Health Department will be taking a closer look at as it starts pushing forward with plans to build its own residential clinic.
The original plan was to have that clinic built by 2011, but that seems unlikely given the current economic climate, Cason said.
