From the window of his corner office in the Gloucester, Massachusetts police station, Chief Leonard Campanello looks out over Solomon Jacobs Park, a known haven for addicts to shoot heroin and other drugs and discard their needles by morning. Gloucester is located on the North Shore, about 40 miles from Boston.

A year ago this week, Campanello launched the program aimed at allowing addicts to come to the police station, turn in drugs or paraphernalia and seek treatment without facing arrest. He admitted then that it might draw “one or 100” participants. Each of the incoming patients would be paired with a volunteer “angel” who would encourage them and steer them through the admitting process. 

The idea was not without controversy. Local District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett expressed concerns that, by assuring addicts they could come forward without facing arrest for drug possession, Campanello was making choices that by law should be left to prosecutors. And June 1, 2015, the program’s first official day, came and went without a single check-in.

By 3:30 a.m. on June 2, however, an addict named Steve Lesnikoski had arrived at the station, and “angel” George Hackford was on his way to assist. Within 10 weeks, the number of addicts who checked into the program had hit 100. As of last Friday, 452 admitted addicts had made their way to the Gloucester police station, according to Campanello and John Rosenthal, a Gloucester resident and a Boston business developer and nonprofit organizer. The two men co-founded the nonprofit Police Assisted Addiction Recovery Initiative (PAARI), which supports the angel initiative.

Versions of the Gloucester program are now being modeled by 112 other law enforcement agencies in 28 states. Those agencies are tapping into a network of more than 200 recovery and treatment center programs, in locales such as Illinois, Tennessee and Florida. 

2,000 addicts aided

Campanello and Rosenthal estimate that up to 2,000 addicts across the country have been taken in by various forms of the program. In Scarborough, Maine, for example, police Chief Robbie Moulton announced last week that his department has placed its 150th participant into a drug treatment and rehab program since starting its Gloucester-based model last October.

“Some of these departments have taken in 200, some have taken in two,” Campanello said. “But everyone is committed to the same approach. That’s what counts.”

The Gloucester program’s beginnings are well-documented. Agonizing over four overdose deaths within the city during the first three months of 2015, Campanello championed a different approach. Built upon his now-familiar refrain that the war on drugs had been lost, he said police departments could not arrest their way out of an opioid crisis that seemed to be growing more dire each day.

Drawing on the idea behind big-city gun buyback programs — in which police departments accept guns, no questions asked — he pitched his idea at a community forum, and to Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken.

The mayor had questions, the chief recounts.

Will it be controversial? Probably, he said. Will it help people? Could it save lives? Yes, he replied.

“‘Then let’s not just talk about it, let’s do it,’ she told me,” Campanello said.

“Look, I worked in health care, I saw these people, I saw these cases,” said Romeo Theken, who worked 15 years as community health care liaison at a local hospital. “I dealt with people not being able to get a bed. When an addict tells you he or she wants to be clean, and you don’t get them right at that minute, you’re going to lose them. You can never get them back. I could see what this could mean.”

Questions remain

The program and its concepts have not drawn universal support.

When state Rep. Ann-Margaret Ferrante filed a bill in March that aimed to extend protections similar to the angel program’s to addicts or family members who call 911 to report an overdose at the time it was happening, Blodgett reiterated his concerns.

“This isn’t about police discretion. This is setting an across-the-board policy that says no one is going to be charged if they’re in possession of drugs, in violation of state law,” Blodgett said at the time. The Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association also opposed the wording of Ferrante’s bill, saying a number of chiefs fear the bill would make it easier for defense attorneys to challenge drug possession charges.

“There are a number of people who have concerns about this,” Blodgett said in March. Those concerns remain, said DA spokesman Carrie Kimball Monihan on Wednesday. 

And not every story has had a happy ending. While the program can get addicts into treatment, there is no guarantee the treatment will be successful. There have been growing pains.

In April, a woman who was being followed by an NBC “Dateline” camera crew focusing on her participation in the Gloucester program was released into custody on the promise that city police had secured a bed for her. Only after she overdosed in the restroom of a Lynn eatery did Judge Matthew Machera become aware that the bed had been sought but not secured. He sent the woman, Cassandra Miller-Brown, 29, to another treatment program while accusing Gloucester police of misleading the court — a charge Campanello disputes. Miller-Brown fled that treatment program as well and was sent to jail after almost dying a second time from an overdose of heroin and fentanyl.

In December, angel program participant Stephenie Jesi, 33, relapsed and suffered a fatal overdose. Jesi’s parents asked Campanello to speak at her funeral, but the loss hit the chief hard.

“That,” he says, “was a very sad day.”

Becoming more efficient

Right from a May 2015 posting on Facebook, Campanello said he knew the program had attracted widespread attention. He did not expect, however, that the first patient would be a cross-country arrival from California. Lesnikoski had made the trip, with help from an anonymous benefactor, all the way from San Jose.

“That really showed me how desperate the situation was,” Campanello said. “How could somebody jump on a plane and fly across country like that to get help?”

“I have never, ever seen a response to a program like we’ve seen for this,” said Rosenthal. “And I’ve never seen such a rapid change in the conversation when it comes to reforming bad public policy … just recognizing that these people need treatment, not jail.

“If you present with cancer or diabetes, for instance, you’re not told to go away and told there’s no bed available for you,” he said. “This is a disease as well, yet — through bias, racism and stigmatization — that’s happened too often to these people for far too long. This program is changing that, changing that conversation. And saving lives.”

A year after its debut, the program has evolved in many ways, not only in numbers but in efficiency. When Lesnikoski arrived in the wee hours of the morning last June 2, first angel George Hackford sat and worked with him through an 11-hour intake process at a local hospital. A person arriving to sign into the program today would likely be placed within as little as two hours, Rosenthal and Campanello say, in part because several departments’ officers have been trained as intake facilitators, and, more and more, are taking on the roles of the angels.

Campanello notes the program still has some 60 angels on its active list — and Hackford has facilitated placement for more than three dozen people himself.

“But there are a lot of reasons for our just handling it,” Campanello said of the officers’ increasing role. “First, we’re always here; we’re open 24/7. Second, if it takes a while for an ‘angel’ to get here, and we can get someone placed within two hours, that can just be more efficient. And it’s working.”

The program is also holding up financially, in part through more than $200,000 raised by PAARI, which received its certification as a federally recognized 501(c)3 nonprofit earlier this year.

Records viewed through the online service Guidestar show the organization has not yet filed its financial statements for its first year. Rosenthal, however, said that PAARI has raised more than $200,000 in cash, and has drawn more than $2 million in in-kind contributions through “scholarships” for free care provided by the participating treatment centers for those who have no insurance.

An agreement template for treatment facilities on the PAARI website calls for the facility to provide “two scholarship treatment plans per month,” while PAARI agrees to provide “the referral of our intakes with insurance to your facility.”

Brian Sullivan, community relations manager at the participating Addiction Campuses, based in Brentwood, Tennessee, said he sees the program working for the partners as well as the patients. He said that, while the center took in just two addicts early on through the Gloucester program, it has been referred several others from other law enforcement agencies tied to the PAARI project.

“We believe in the model,” he said, “and we think it’s going to save even more lives if we can get more people on board. It costs over $30,000 to house a Tennessee inmate for a year. Imagine if that money was spent toward treatment. That’s always been our message.”

Cutting crime

Campanello notes the launch of the program has not meant a cutback in the criminal pursuit of drug dealers. Citing department statistics, he notes that drug arrests for distribution or trafficking have risen by 12 percent over a 12-month period leading into June 2015 and through May of this year.

“This signifies to us, hopefully, that we are spending our time investigating the more serious drug violations,” he said. “It also could indicate that we are getting some really good information on high-level drug dealers from the trust we’ve built. We never solicit information, but often find grateful people or families offering up dealers as another way to escape this disease.”

At the same time, department figures show that cases of breaking and entering have dropped by 15 percent, larceny by 21 percent, robbery by 25 percent and shoplifting by 38 percent, though the statistics do not cite hard numbers for those crimes.

Moving forward

Campanello and Rosenthal say they realize there is much to be done in the program’s second year. That includes a coordinated legislative push to clamp new production and prescription mandates on the pharmaceutical industry, which both say has — despite visits to Gloucester by Pfizer and Purdue representatives last fall — ignored their calls to take more responsibility for the opioid crisis.

The chief also noted that, while some 60 percent of those entering the angel program have been from outside the city, other departments have called him to report that people from Gloucester have checked into similar programs elsewhere.

“Why would they go someplace else? Because they probably still feel a stigma at home,” Campanello says. “That tells me we still have work to do in that regard.”

Today, Campanello still looks out his office window onto Solomon Jacobs Park. He acknowledges it remains a place where addicts occasionally use.

“They still do,” he says. “But you know what? If just one person there looks over here and recognizes this is not a place to fear, but a place where he or she can get help, then I’ll know we’re really getting through. That’s what I’d like to see.”

Lamont writes for the Gloucester, Massachusetts Daily Times.