Opioid crisis the target of new law
With federal NOPAIN Act, which will take effect in 2025, advocates hope for reduction in prescriptions
When Jennie Burke’s 13-year-old daughter needed hernia surgery six years ago, it wasn’t the operation Burke feared — it was her daughter’s recovery from it, and whether she’d need opioids to keep the pain at bay.
At the time, Burke’s brother was “hitting rock bottom” from a heroin addiction that would later kill him. Like many Americans in the early 2000s, he became addicted to opioids after being prescribed OxyContin following an appendectomy. In 2020, the year he died, 68,630 people died from opioid overdoses.
Given her family’s history with addiction, Burke was determined to keep her daughter off opioids. But she didn’t have to worry. Though a discharge nurse gave her daughter a prescription for 44 oxycodone tablets after her surgery, she was able to control the pain by alternating between Tylenol and ibuprofen, and never complained of intolerable discomfort.
Burke, who lives in Baltimore with her family, was relieved — but also angry. If she hadn’t known better, she might have given her daughter all of the pills in the days following the operation. Studies show a person’s risk for chronic opioid use increases after they take the medication for longer than three days, and goes up even more sharply after five days.
“In many instances, it’s easier to get narcotics than it is to get other modalities of pain relief,” Burke said. “It makes no sense.”
But Burke and other advocates nationwide are hopeful that may soon change. The NOPAIN Act — which Congress passed in an end-of-year spending package — will take effect in 2025, setting up a separate Medicare payment for certain non-opioid pain management
With movable walls, seats, floor sections and even balconies, the space can transform from a 1,000-seat venue into three smaller spaces.
of refuge. They follow invitation-only events, including an open house for Sept. 11 victims’ families and first responders on the 22nd anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the trade center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.
“A day doesn’t go by where I don’t think about 9/11 and the responsibility that we have to that community,” artistic director Bill Rauch said recently from the cubelike building, which stands 138 feet tall.
Daylight filters through the Portuguese marble walls and turns them into a radiant amber quilt patterned by chocolate and caramel veins. Sedate by day, the building’s boxy exterior is designed to glow from within at night. Its nearly 5,000 marble panels are backlit by chandeliers in a corridor surrounding theater.
Nearby but out of sight is the 9/11 Memorial, which is obscured by the half-inchthick stone, subtly encased in glass for protection and energy efficiency. The windowless design keeps the buzz of theatergoers at a respectful distance from people who are paying tribute at the memorial, and vice versa, architect Joshua Ramus explained.
“I didn’t want to treat the memorial like a spectacle,” he said.
The arts center was built largely with private donations, including $130 million from former Mayor Mike Bloomberg and $75 million from investor Ronald Perelman, plus $100 million from a government-financed redevelopment agency.
“There’s never been anything like it in the area, and it’s going to continue fueling the city’s comeback from the pandemic — just as the arts helped fuel our comeback after 9/11,”
Bloomberg said in a statement.
With movable walls, seats, floor sections and even balconies, the space can transform from a 1,000seat venue into three smaller spaces. Those, in turn, can
be arranged into a total of 62 different stage-and-audience configurations, with some as intimate as 100-seat rooms.
Special walnut paneling deals with the acoustical challenges of variable audience
sizes and stage locations. Foot-thick rubber pads beneath the theaters absorb the sound and vibrations of a hive of subway and commuter train lines.
The opening season includes works as reflective as an opera about a case of racist hazing among U.S. soldiers in the post9/11 war in Afghanistan, and as exuberant as “Cats” re-imagined in drag ballroom culture. “The Matrix” actor Laurence Fishburne is premiering a one-man show. Authors and presidential daughters Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush are talking about parenting. Native American comics are coming together for a night of stand-up.
“We didn’t want to avoid the subject of trauma, but we also didn’t want to soak in it,” Rauch said. He and Kamara emphasize that the institution aims to feel accessible and draw a wide range of people, with ticket prices starting at $40 and free performances planned in the lobby, which will be open to the public daily.
Yet the center has confronted questions about its impact on the community and cultural scene.
When activists pressed this year to increase affordable housing in a planned skyscraper elsewhere at the trade center, their campaign argued that too much redevelopment money has gone to lavish, nonresidential buildings while many New Yorkers have been priced out of the area. Its median household income and median rent are about double the citywide average.
“The performing arts center is kind of an amenity for a luxury neighborhood that they built,” said Todd Fine, who runs an advocacy business for historical preservation in lower Manhattan. He said the facility needs “to prove that the public is going to benefit.”
Many lower Manhattan arts groups struggled after 9/11, and an early conceptual blueprint for redevelopment called for “strengthening existing cultural institutions” while developing new ones. Early on, the arts center was to house three established groups — two theaters and a visual arts museum — plus a new museum celebrating freedom. Those plans then changed, though the 9/11 Museum took shape in a separate space underground.
Rauch says the Perelman center is committed to collaborating with local arts groups. The head of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, an advocacy organization, believes the facility will foster an arts-district ambience that stands to draw attention to local groups, not compete with them.
“It’s a huge statement to have such a beautiful building dedicated to theater on that sacred ground,” said council CEO Craig Peterson.
On a recent day, James Giaccone pointed out the arts center to bystanders from the edge of one of the 9/11 Memorial’s waterfall pools. That edge bears the name of his brother Joseph Giaccone, a 43-year-old finance executive, father of two and husband.
James Giaccone, a volunteer with Sept. 11-related organizations including Tuesday’s Children, initially was wary of the political controversies surrounding early plans for the arts space.
Then he came to see it as a step forward for the trade center and on a personal level, an embrace of living life fully. His and his brother’s families love going to the theater.
“So I think he would appreciate it,” Giaccone said.