Posted on: Friday, January 10, 2003
Kaua'i leaders call for coordination in battling drugs
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Kaua'i Bureau
LIHU'E, Kaua'i — The drug abuse response community on Kaua'i needs coordination and direction, said speakers at a drug crisis meeting yesterday, and they called on Mayor Bryan Baptiste to establish a county coordinator to unify the island's fragmented anti-drug efforts.
Baptiste called together more than 60 state and county officials, law enforcement, judiciary, religious leaders, community agencies and others to find new ways to address the problem. They met all morning in the county's Civil Defense Emergency Operating Center. Baptiste identified drug abuse during the mayoral campaign as a major problem, and promised to try to find answers.
"This is not just a job. This is a crusade," Baptiste said of the task.
Police Sgt. Danilo Abadilla said a drug abuser recently asked to be taken to jail. He had burglarized a home for money to buy crystal methamphetamine, but he wanted to stop.
"He didn't really want to go to jail. He wanted treatment," Abadilla said. But police did not know where to send him. There is no residential treatment facility on the island for those seeking help for drug dependence, and police did not have an updated list of the kinds of alternative services available.
Community organizer Jeff Chandler said the problem is pervasive.
"It's in my family, and it's already hit the kids," Chandler said. It is difficult to fight because "it happens in the night, not in front of your eyes," he said.
The experts in the meeting identified many programs that work against drug abuse, and some that don't, but a repeated mantra was the lack of coordinated response to the problem.
"You get all these different agencies, and everybody only gets one part," Chandler said.
One speaker after another called for some kind of high-level coordination.
"Sometimes when you work in little vacuums, it gets tiring and it gets overwhelming," Baptiste said.
He pledged to try to find financing from businesses or individuals to immediately hire a drug-abuse coordinator to work with all the agencies that address drug problems.
"There is a sense of urgency. Each and every day we don't do something, we lose another of our children," he said.
He called on the drug abuse response community to stay involved, and to submit to his office ideas on how to better control the island's drug problem. The group is to meet again next month, and Baptiste said he hopes by then to have a plan of action, and to have identified others in the drug response community who need to be involved in the process.
"Alone, in your little silos, there is no way that we're going to solve this problem," Baptiste said.
Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 245-3074.
