Georgia losing patience with drug treatment tourists

RINGGOLD, Ga. — In the northwest corner of Georgia, where cows and crops vastly outnumber people, a small cluster of privately owned treatment centers have sprung up in recent years for heroin and prescription painkiller addicts.

And most of the patients aren’t even from the state.

Relaxed rules in Georgia and stricter regulations in Tennessee created a recipe for the facilities to locate a few miles from the state line. Each year, the Georgia centers draw thousands of addicts from Tennessee, some who drive for hours to get treatment. Locals are fed up with the onslaught of outof-towners who pick up their meds and leave, and they complained so loudly that Georgia legislators recently passed a law essentially preventing any new clinics from opening up in the area.

“Georgia is getting inundated with these treatment centers and they’re really drawing patients in from outside of our area and that’s a big concern,” Catoosa County Sheriff Gary Sisk said. “We can’t be the solution for all the surrounding states.”

Georgia leads the South in number of treatment centers with 71. Florida, with twice the population, has 69.

Last year, one in five people treated at an opioid treatment center in Georgia came from out of state, according to state Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities records obtained by The Associated Press under an open records request.

In the northwest corner of Georgia, two out of every three patients were from out of state.

Sisk has been with the sheriff’s office for 27 years. He said that with the growth of the treatment industry, he worries about increasing crime, including parking lot brawls and people driving after abusing their medication.

Patients and treatment center owners say the sheriff’s concerns are overblown and perpetuate the stigma of trouble around facilities that are often disparagingly called “methadone clinics.” A 2016 report in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs found that, in general, there is more crime associated with a convenience store than opioid treatment programs. Counseling is also a large part of successful treatment.

“Medication is really the smallest part of what we do,” said Zac Talbott, the owner of Counseling Solutions in Chatsworth, Georgia, one of the five facilities near the state line.

The shortage of treatment facilities is a problem nationwide. More than a dozen states have fewer than 10 clinics each.

In 2015, fewer than 20 percent of people who needed addiction treatment received it, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human services.

One of Talbott’s patients is