Great Barrington — While the town appears to be taking steps to deal with an increasingly serious heroin abuse problem, those in the most southern part of Berkshire County who are suffering with addiction and want methadone treatment are forced to travel early in the morning to Pittsfield.
No other options exist.
At Monday’s (September 12) Selectboard meeting, Kingsley Little told the board he is the father of a 26-year-old heroin addict who struggles to get to Pittsfield for methadone treatment, and then must turn around to head south to Connecticut for work.

“He always has a monkey on his back,” Little said of his son’s addiction. “His friends are dying, he’s overdosed three times, he’s lucky he’s here.”
Little said he has been participating in a support group called D.O.P.E. (Discussing Our Personal Experiences) held twice a month at Berkshire South Community Center, which was started by Jennifer Wheeler, who has written in The Edge about her struggle with heroin addiction.
Little said D.O.P.E. was one way to find “solutions to the opioid epidemic in town.”
He further said the drug trade in Great Barrington was “thriving.”
“We live in a wonderful town…a beautiful community,” he added. “How do we get people to realize that when we’re walking along shopping there are kids buying and selling heroin?”
Little said the Great Barrington Police and Health Departments have been “wonderful” at trying to work solutions.
“It is probably the number one health issue of our time,” said Health Department officer Jayne Smith. “But people are finally realizing that it’s a human issue and [Massachusetts] State Without Stigma campaign has been really helpful.”
Smith said that distancing oneself from the disease has become impossible since so many people, through family or friends, are “affected in one way or another by drug addiction issues.”
Smith also said she agreed with Little that the lack of treatment options south of Pittsfield were a problem. In Pittsfield, Spectrum Health Systems Inc. runs a methadone clinic out of Berkshire Medical Center. Spectrum opened another in North Adams since so many residents were traveling to Pittsfield for treatment.
“A lot of people can’t get up to Pittsfield,” Smith said. “What if you had a back injury and you got addicted to oxycodone? There’s a small number of addicts that can actually get up to Pittsfield.”

That may partly explain why Spectrum President and CEO Kirt Isaacson told the Edge that the company — and the state — tracked a very small number of patients from south Berkshire County who were coming to Pittsfield for treatment. Isaacson said the number, “20 or under,” simply didn’t support the company opening a treatment clinic in one of the southern Berkshire towns.
“We’re not considering anything there,” he said, noting that the Pittsfield clinic “was a blessing” for patients who previously had to travel to Holyoke. “Unfortunately, there is demand throughout the state,” he said. But the numbers, he claimed, do not support a clinic south of Pittsfield.
Smith, who moved here a few years ago from Springfield, Vermont, said it had taken a “long time for that community to realize they had a problem. Great Barrington didn’t have to get to that point before we woke up.”
Smith said what would continue to be helpful is the collaborative work of both the police and health departments with other county organizations. According to the town’s Wednesday (September 13) press release, both “are founding members of the Fairview/GB Opioid Task Force, along with Fairview Hospital, the Railroad Street Youth Project (RSYP), the Berkshire Opioid Abuse Prevention Coalition (BOAPC) and Board of Selectman Member Stephen Bannon, who is also a pharmacist for Fairview Hospital.”
The task force had initially formed to research and write grants to get the overdose reversal drug Narcan for first responders in the fire and police departments, but continued to work addressing addiction in the community through policy work. The fire department now carries Narcan, and the police department will have it soon, making it the second police department in the county to carry it. The first was North Adams.
Also, Fairview and the GB Opioid Task Force are working to give hospital patients information about potentially addictive prescriptions, and are tracking prescriptions through a Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) platform called MassPAT.

“The Town of Great Barrington has been, and will continue to be, a leader in substance abuse prevention,” said Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin in the press release. “I am proud of all that our community has done thus far to combat this crisis, but there is certainly more work to do.”
A recent Berkshire Opioid Abuse Prevention Coalition (BOAPC) event sparked a conversation about the need for treatment options in Southern Berkshire County.
And at Monday’s Selectboard meeting, in response to Little’s address to the board, Chair Sean Stanton said: “I think we should talk about this as a board.”
Board member Ed Abrahams said attending a D.O.P.E. meeting “changed my thinking…it changes our thinking from criminal to patient.”
Railroad Street Youth Project (RSYP) Executive Director Ananda Timpane said these collaborations were exciting, particularly with Cara Becker working for the police department, and Smith at the health department. She said Becker and Smith were “going above and beyond” in “showing up” to meetings and representing the town.
RSYP conducts surveys to better understand the early drug use habits of young people, and to prevent drug abuse, and was the recently the recipient of a $100,000 grant to further do that prevention work. In her capacity talking so frequently to young people, Timpane has learned a lot about addiction and treatment options in the Berkshires.

“This is a rural issue,” she said. “How can we meet needs of the population we do have? How to make it work?”
Timpane said there were “two barriers” to prevention: a small population in a rural area, and the “universal issue” of treating those with “substance abuse disorders with stigma and distance.”
“I give Great Barrington credit for finally acknowledging there’s an issue, but they need to do a lot more,” said Rep. William “Smitty” Pignatelli (D-Lenox). He also said he is aware of the deficiency of treatment options, adding that he had spoken with a representative from Spectrum a year ago about a treatment clinic in South County. The company told him the demographics couldn’t maintain it. But Pignatelli says he wonders about these statistics, and says this is a problem.
“I think it’s desperately needed [in South County],” he said. “The [Pittsfield] methadone clinic opens at 6 a.m., the treatment is from 6 to 9:30 a.m., and if you are able to work, you have to have a sympathetic employer.”
Pignatelli said the problem is growing. Of the inmates in the Berkshire House of Corrections, he noted, 80 to 90 percent have drug issues. He added that there were a record number of heroin overdoses in the county this last summer.
And just today Gov. Charlie Baker and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, though the administration’s Opioid Working Group, released an “in depth analysis” of the state’s opioid-related deaths, which “have increased by 350 percent in Massachusetts in 15 years.” This report, according to the statement, “marks the first time data from multiple state agencies has been linked to give a comprehensive overview of deaths associated with the opioid epidemic.”
And back at Monday’s Selectboard meeting, Kingsley Little implored the town, with a gentle pleading, to address this disease with compassion and help those who are entangled in it. To do so he employed a bit of philosophy by Ludvig Wittgenstein, who said, “The world is everything that is the case.”
And to interpret Wittgenstein’s proposition, he used an excerpt by the late novelist David Foster Wallace, who said Wittgenstein’s words were “the most beautiful beginning in all of Western literature,” and said that “with this in mind, our aim should be to see the world, to attend to everything that is the case around us. We should imagine our way into the lives those around us lead, to reflect on what wild contingencies led to our state and to theirs, to reason our way into their beliefs and imagine our way into their fears.”