Opioid-related deaths in York County increased by 75 percent from 2014-2016, according to the Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services.
This prompted the creation of the South Carolina Medication-Assisted Treatment Court, a program that assists criminals with substance abuse or opioid use disorders. Winthrop’s Department of Social Work is tasked with conducting the research and evaluation for the project.
When the opportunity arose to partner in this project, social work professors Duane Neff and Jessica Yang couldn’t turn it down.
“When we got the call that said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in helping us out with this?’ we said, ‘Absolutely.’ That’s right in our wheelhouse of what we do, the research piece and the program evaluation, so we said yes and we helped write the [grant] response,” Neff said.
The Medication-Assisted Treatment Court is funded by a $900,000 grant. After arrest, criminals with substance abuse disorders often don’t receive the attention they need when put in jail.
“You can sit in jail anywhere from four to seven months waiting for your court case and so forth,” Neff said.
The program takes those criminals that struggle with substance abuse from jail and puts them in a drug-free environment where they can get medicated treatment while they wait for their court date.
“If you are identified as having an opioid or alcohol use disorder and are screened by the clinician on site, then we will remove you from the jail, get you into treatment. Once your court case comes up, you’ll return to the court and be able to say, ‘I’ve been engaged in medication-assisted treatment for the past two, three months. I’ve been seeing counseling. I’ve been clean with my urinalysis and so forth.’ What this does is it covers that gap, so that people aren’t sitting there in jail suffering and not getting any treatment,” Neff said.
The South Carolina Medication-Assisted Treatment Court launched on Feb. 1, so Neff and Yang are still in the process of constructing a team to assist with the three-year program.
“We’re in the process of hiring students to work on the project. We’re still in that phase. Hopefully, I would hope within a month, they will start engaging with people with opioid use disorder and substance abuse disorder that would benefit from this program,” Neff said.
Their goal is to have the data collection and evaluations that are part of Winthrop’s responsibilities be completed mostly by students.
“The students are the ones that are out here doing the heavy lifting. They are the ones that are benefitting from this. They’re facing these people with opioid use disorders, they’re working with community agencies, they’re tackling these tough problems like, how do we measure improvement in someone who’s struggling with a substance use disorder, or whose impoverished in this community or needs mentorship or whatever those needs are. They go out and they wrestle with it in the community, and they bring it back here, and we lovingly and knowingly reguide them wherever they may be, and it really supplements the classroom and makes our jobs a lot more fun,” Yang said.
The Department of Social Work will be focusing on the “evaluation of outcomes” and assessing if the program is successful. As it stands, the treatment program does not exist in York County, leaving Winthrop’s team to create a guide for other counties facing an opioid epidemic to follow.
“We are following people as this gets up [and] running with the end goal of creating a manual so that we can take this program and say…here’s a guidebook of how we were able to do this in York County, the struggles we had, how we were able to overcome those, the people we had around the table, all of these different pieces to get a program like this up and running. So we kind of lurk in the shadows and document all of this so that we can take that manual and share it with other counties,” Yang said.
While measuring “success” in someone with a drug addiction can be difficult, this is what Yang said another major task that falls under Winthrop’s duties is “a formal evaluation of the outcomes to look and see if this program is successful in keeping defendants out of the system.”
“Once we pull them out for participation in the program, are they staying out or are they committing crimes to obtain substances, property crimes to get money, violent crimes, that kind of thing. Are we able to keep them sober through the adjudication and disposition of their case to where they can complete the program at that point. We’re doing both of these simultaneously, working with our state and local partners to help gather all of that data,” Yang said.
Opioid addiction affects communities and individuals that are dealing with unemployment and underemployment. The loss of a job has an incredible emotional impact. Pair this with a physical injury and the spiral into dependency begins.
“You have this loss of purpose combined with these physical complaints and that sort of spirals into this opioid use disorder. In these sort of struggling and improving development communities, we see this pattern a lot. Other states like West Virginia, the Midwest, states throughout the deep south are all seeing this sort of similar pattern, and I think that that’s a lot of what we’re seeing in the community, is just that un- and underemployment kind of catching this tidal wave of this readily available substance to cope with that crisis,” Yang said.
Yang said the Department of Social Work is equipped to handle their involvement in the Medication-Assisted Treatment Court because of the department’s consistent engagement with the community.
“I think first and foremost we have people on faculty like Dr. Neff and others who have spent a considerable amount of time engaged in this community. Over the past six years, there is very few arms of well-being that we have not been engaged in. Housing, health, wellness, mental health, now recently into the schools. We are a very public-facing department. This is my second year, and in those two years I’ve been able to collaborate with Dr. Neff in all of those agencies,” Yang said.
“We are a group that works very hard to stay engaged with the public. That’s one of our core values as social workers, is social justice and service. That’s a third of our value base right there. When we’re thinking about the scholarship that we do, for almost all of us, that is what’s front and center,” Yang said.
