Mom fighting for opioid addiction treatment
After watching her daughter’s struggle, woman seeks change
BOISE, Idaho — Marianne Morrison is a mom on a mission.
She has spent the past 10 years watching her daughter, Sawyer, walk down the path of drug addiction and stints in and out of jail on drug charges.
“Over the years, I’ve tried to contact every person I could think of how to not put people in prison for opioid use,” she said. “Because it’s a sickness. It’s a mental health problem. People will disagree with me, but it’s no different than having cancer or diabetes. It’s a sickness.”
Morrison, of Boise, is putting together a proposal to the Idaho Behavioral Health Council on ways to spend an estimated $218 million coming to Idaho as part of the national opioid settlement.
She’s in favor of more reentry and treatment facilities instead of incarceration. Not only is it better for people struggling with addiction, in the long run, it would actually save the state money, she argues. She has done the math. The cost to house a person in prison or jail in Idaho comes out to about $75 a day, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, while the cost of someone in a community reentry program is about $42 a day, after the inmate contributes a portion of their wages.
With 37% of Idaho’s prisoners incarcerated for some sort of drug charge, Morrison calculates shifting from a prison model to a community reentry model could translate to a savings of as much as $36 million a year.
The state of Idaho could leverage the opioid settlement
funds to make it happen, she said.
When the opioid settlement was first announced in 2021, Morrison said she was optimistic.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to make a really big difference,’ ” she said. “Idaho’s going to get this money, and they’re going to be so excited that we can make a change in our state, and we can use this money for treatment centers, more education, prevention, medication, rehabilitation, and it seems like, the frustrating part is, no one seems to care.”
She has been watching the Idaho Behavioral Health Council meetings and is disappointed in the group’s lack of specificity in its recommendations and its lack of monitoring the settlement money as it’s coming into the state.
So far, only $900,000 of $12 million that’s been allocated to the state has been spent. The Idaho Behavioral Health Council last year made five broad recommendations. Two of
those recommendations were funded to the tune of about $400,000. The biggest chunk, though, $500,000, wasn’t even recommended by the council and went to the Idaho State Police for increased drug seizures, based on Gov. Brad Little’s recommendation and the Legislature’s approval.
But drugs like fentanyl are cheap to produce, so a seizure will mean another batch coming in. And this isn’t a problem they can arrest the way out of.
“(Getting arrested) is like a 20-minute part of a lifelong process,” she said. “The police don’t really have anything to do with this problem. The thing is, if we can catch it in the beginning or catch it after (the police arrest someone), or make changes after (an arrest), that’s really where the money should be spent.”
Sending people with drug use disorder to prison and then releasing them just sets them up for failure and a repeated cycle of
incarceration — and cost to the taxpayer.
The cycle that Morrison has watched with her own daughter over the past 10 years tells her that the system of incarceration we have now isn’t working. Morrison said they tried everything: therapy, sports, medication and nothing stuck. Morrison noted that her family was financially able to try different methods; not every family is able to afford it.
Sawyer progressed from juvenile detention to 30 days in jail, then 60 days, and when she became an adult, the drugs became more serious and so did the charges.
“She’s been in and out so many times at this point,” Morrison said. “It’s been over 10 years.”
Sawyer would do a little bit of time, get released, relapse, go back to jail.
“But if she had to spend three months (in prison) and then if she went to some sort of alternative or residential setting where she had to go to her
meetings, take her meds, had a job, but she was supervised like in a dorm, then there may at some point be some chance that she would transition into a member of society that was possibly not a drug addict,” Morrison said.
But more than that, Morrison said, she would be doing something useful.
“Because literally she’s sitting in a cell 24/7, so that’s not helping her, and it’s definitely not helping the community because it’s costing them a ton of money,” Morrison said. “And then she’s going to come out and just do the exact same thing. So then she’s going to burden the police, the court system.”
Morrison would like to see the state use opioid settlement money to build a secure dorm-like housing facility where residents could get treatment and counseling and could work during the day, rather than sit in prison or jail doing nothing.
The Idaho Behavioral Health Council recommended “One-time funding for housing initiatives” but did not make specific recommendations on policies or the level of spending.
The governor did recommend and the Legislature approved $750,000 of ongoing funding for the Department of Correction’s transitional housing program, to provide housing for parolees during the first 60-90 days of their release.
That money is coming out of the general fund, not out of the opioid settlement funds.
Morrison is worried that the way the opioid settlement money is being distributed and monitored is a missed opportunity for the state. While $218 million may sound like a lot of money, it’s being paid out over nearly two decades and is scattered among the state government, all 44 counties, some cities, school districts and fire districts and all seven public health districts.
“They’ve always said, ‘We don’t have money for that.’ ‘It’s not in the budget.’ ‘That would cost millions of dollars.’ ‘We’ll never do that,’ ” Morrison said. “It always came down to that’s not the way the state wants to spend their tax dollars. So OK, fine.”
But these aren’t tax dollars. Morrison views the money as intended for the benefit of those who have become addicted.
“I guess I would like them to understand this is costing the state nothing,” she said. “You have been given this money as a settlement from these for-profit corporations. This is not taxpayer money. This is like free money. So you’re not giving them housing. You’re not giving them anything. The state has been given this money for (the benefit of those who have become addicted). And that’s what you should be doing with that money.”