ADDICTS OVERWHELMING JAILS, ERS

COLORADO SPRINGS - Alcoholics, drug abusers and the mentally ill are
clogging the city's ambulance services and hospital emergency rooms, and
dying in El Paso County's jails.

"It's a huge problem," said El Paso County Administrator Terry Harris,
following the kickoff Tuesday of a six-month collaborative study in an
attempt to find solutions.

"This thing is a community problem, and we're not addressing it," Harris
said. "I don't know what another study is going to produce, but we've got
to come up with some solutions." Representatives of local government,
health care agencies and hospitals met for two hours Tuesday to review the
problem and hear plans by Boston-based consultants hired to conduct the study.

Mike Katzenstein, president of Behavioral Healthcare Consultants of
Massachusetts, said El Paso County is not unusual in its need for services.
As is the case nationwide, an estimated 8 to 10 percent of people seek help
for alcohol and drug addiction or mental health problems.

"The problem and the disease are very typical," Katzenstein said. A high
percentage of those in the nation's jails and prisons suffer from addiction
and mental health problems, he said.

The Pikes Peak Mental Health Center, a nonprofit agency, used to run a
detoxification center near the county jail. Forced out by county space
needs, the agency opened the Lighthouse Assessment Center to provide
medical, mental illness and crisis services, as well as a locked unit for
those deemed dangerous.

Last year, Pikes Peak Mental Health threatened to close the Lighthouse
unless it received $1.6 million to deal with higher-thanexpected costs of
handling the problem. Memorial Hospital, its emergency room clogged with
alcoholics and drug addicts, increased its payment to about $657,000,
emphasizing it was a one-time payment. El Paso County came up with a
contract amount, based on people served.

Since 1996, substance abuse and psychiatric admissions to the city's
emergency rooms have climbed 68 percent, said Linda Lewis, local manager
for what is being called the Behavioral Health/Detox Services Project.
Lewis' employer, Penrose-St. Francis Health Services, budgeted $150,000 to
hire Katzenstein's firm.

In the meantime, El Paso County faces two pending lawsuits from the
American Civil Liberties Union, based on the deaths of 10 jail inmates
since 1998.

One came on the heels of Andrew Spillane's death in May 2000. Spillane, a
chronic alcoholic, died at Memorial Hospital after he was taken to jail for
marijuana violations, placed in special detention when he became combative
and given two blasts of pepper spray.

"He needed to be in a hospital, not in the jail's infirmary and certainly
not in a special detention cell," said Mark Silverstein, legal director for
the ACLU of Colorado. Earlier this year, the ACLU filed another lawsuit
against the county, claiming that inadequate treatment of mental health
problems resulted in the deaths of nine other inmates.

"We don't have the ability to determine what inmate is mentally ill,"
Harris said. "If we did determine that, we can't care for them." The
question, then, becomes who will, and that, he said, is a community problem.