The faces of addiction: Addicts in Clark County continue to seek detox
Jan Farr is a Clark County local, and a strong voice for the addiction community. She attends countless county meetings, works with schools in the Camas School District, with the YWCA and other organizations in hopes of bringing more resources to the area.
Farr’s transformation into a voice for addicts in Clark County isn’t just an expression community activism — it’s a way of making sure that other residents don’t have to go through what Farr went through with her own son seven years ago.
Since his addiction started at the age of 16, Farr’s son has attended four different rehab facilities around the country.
Farr and her husband have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to help their son stay clean.
Farr’s family struggled to find resources in Southwest Washington that could help their son become clean.
“There’s really no proactive addiction help in Clark County,” Farr said.
When Farr’s son turned to the dark world of drug use at 16, the family didn’t even consider that he might be dealing with mental illness.
“We just thought that it was the anxiety that kids get when they’re growing up,” Farr said. Although she did not specify what form of mental illness her son suffers from, she did confirm that mental illness has played a large role in her son’s addiction.
The first time that Farr’s son went into treatment was while he was a student at Camas High School.
“He was the first inpatient student at Camas High School,” she said, meaning he stayed full-time in a clinic while under treatment. “I was supposed to go in once a week and get his school work, but they (the school) didn’t want anything to do with it.”
Although she struggled with school officials throughout her son’s treatment during senior year, Farr made sure he didn’t fall behind in his education.
“I made sure that he graduated, even though he missed 30 days of school,” she said.
Camas High School officials did not respond to several emails and phone calls regarding how the school supports students who are facing addiction.
Farr said after she asked many times for help, officials suggested her son transfer to Hayes Freedom High School, a local alternative school.
Students in the Camas area refer to Hayes Freedom High School as the place where Camas sends its “trouble students,” ranging from students on IEP’s (Individualized Education Programs) to students who deal with health issues that interfere with their attendance.
Farr said she met with the principal of Hayes Freedom High School, and that she learned that within the past two years alone, fifteen students who were current or former students at Camas High and Hayes Freedom High had died due to drug related incidents.
Officials at the schools were not, however, able to confirm this.
Amy Holmes, the principal of Hayes Freedom High School, said she could not confirm the number of deaths that Farr had reported. Nor was she able to confirm that the meeting with Farr had happened.
“While I know of students who may have died from drug related incidents, they were not my students,” Holmes said.
The principal did confirm, however, that there is a lack of addiction services in the Camas area.
“I believe Clark County is struggling to serve addicted youth in the community for a variety of reasons and it is unfortunate that our community is not immune to it,” Holmes said.
Clark County’s struggles with drug and alcohol abuse are common in the rest of the state — and getting worse. According to a study done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2014–2015, death due to drug overdoses rose by 10.5 percent in the state of Washington.
In 2014, the death rate of individuals who died due to drug overdoses in Washington State was 13.3 percent. In 2015, it was 14.7 percent.
To help prevent such deaths, there are 16 addiction services listed in the official Clark County directory. But the resources missing, said Farr, are inpatient treatment centers.
“The most proactive is Lifeline, which only has thirty six beds for all of Clark County,” said Farr. “Half of them are for detox, and half of them are for inpatient.”
Shannon Angel, a marketing representative for the Vancouver branch of Lifeline Connections, was able to better explain why exactly there is a lack of addiction services in Clark County.
“Our detox beds are almost always full, and it’s the same thing with our residential treatment as well,” Angel said.
When beds are completely full at Lifeline, individuals are sent to facilities outside of Clark County.
“We often send individuals to a facility located in Kelso,” Angel said. That small town is located in Cowlitz County.
According to Angel, Lifeline is the only inpatient treatment center located in Clark County that offers detox to patients. While Serenity Lane offers outpatient treatment in Vancouver, the organization’s inpatient detox and treatment center is located near Eugene, Oregon, about two hours south.
If medical detox is not performed, especially with addicts using certain substances such as alcohol, benzodiazepines, opioids, stimulants, and ketamine, the addict is at risk of suffering from seizures, withdrawal, hallucinations, tremors, and in many situations, even death.
In 2005, about seven years before Farr faced the crisis with her son, another individual in Clark County struggled to find help.
Elise Gregson, a mom of four children, nearly died due to a prescription drug addiction.
“I needed detox, and I needed treatment,” she said. “But the choices that were presented to me scared me because the people that were being treated in these facilities were individuals that came off of the streets.”
By the winter of 2006, Gregson’s parents flew her out to Utah, where she spent three months attending inpatient treatment at Cirque Lodge.
The cost of her treatment was $30,000 a month.
By the end of her treatment, Gregson had paid $90,000.
As Gregson’s example shows, recovery programs are not cheap.
According to a range of data collected by multiple individual rehab facilities, the cost of detox for an addict is around $1,000-$1,500, and the average cost of a 30 day in-patient rehab program can range from $6,000-$20,000.
Detoxification can often be covered in part or full by either health insurance programs, or by government programs.
All together, Farr and her husband have paid over $75,000 in fees related to their son’s drug addiction. Farr’s son continues to struggle to stay clean, and has relapsed several times since his addiction started at the age of 16.
For more information on alcohol and drug addiction services in Clark County, visit the official Clark County website here.
