A Mile High

Trick or treatment?

Comments (0) By Patricia Calhoun Thursday, Mar 1 2001

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During the 2000 legislative session, HB 1254 went even further. The "private treatment programs" targeted by the bill were expanded to include non-residential as well as residential programs. Which meant that if an applicant wasn't accepted into a treatment program, he might still be on the streets.

Or maybe behind the wheel -- where a drunk could prove just as deadly as Donta Page.

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By December 15, the Colorado Department of Human Services had already spent months trying to determine the ramifications of the new legislation, and its Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division sent an explanatory memo to all licensed alcohol and drug treatment programs in the state. House bills 1353 and 1254 "require any residential or outpatient treatment program to notify the Colorado Interstate Compact Office whenever an out-of-state offender enrolls in education or treatment," the memo noted. "This includes DUI offenders as well as non-DUI offenders." And as interpreted by the department, it also includes people convicted of misdemeanor traffic infractions as well as actual felonies.

"In order to identify clients who are out-of-state offenders, treatment programs will have to ask all potential clients whether they 'have been convicted of or have agreed to a deferred judgment, deferred sentence, or deferred prosecution for a crime in another state,'" the memo continued, noting that a "three-page procedural summary of the steps necessary to stay in compliance with the legislation and with ADAD treatment regulations" was attached.

"Since these requirements are new, we do not have any data to indicate the extent of the impact of this legislation," the memo concluded. "It will require extra steps for those programs that choose to admit out-of-state offenders into treatment, and may delay the entry into treatment for those who need it."

In the ten weeks since that memo was sent out, Lance Musselman, its co-author and head of the state's DUI treatment programs, has begun collecting anecdotal data. "It's an awfully broad net, catching run-of-the-mill DUI offenders," he says. "We're just starting to see the impact."

His office receives many queries from treatment agencies, wondering if they can help anyone who's committed any kind of offense in another state. In order to avoid the paperwork hassles, some programs have decided simply not to accept any out-of-staters. Others report that "clients have walked out during the intake process," Musselman says. And some of these, he adds, "may be the ones the legislature meant to catch."

When lawmakers were debating the bills, addiction experts argued -- unsuccessfully -- that alcohol treatment programs should be excluded from the legislation. After all, they said, these people posed far less of a risk to society when they were getting help than when they were left on the streets.

For the past several months, Denver officials have been debating a proposed ordinance that would bring local shelters in compliance with the state law. Shelter officials are worried that if they ask too many questions of people who need a bed for the night, ask too many questions of alcoholics who want to take that first step toward getting dry, they might lose those people altogether. The issue is so sticky that the city may try to push the ordinance deadline back from March 15 to mid-May.

Twenty-four hours, many helpful conversations and a very dry night after we discovered Colorado's legislative loophole, I drove my young friend to a suburban police department, where she was duly fingerprinted and photographed by a baffled officer who had never heard of HB 1254. And then we continued on to a treatment program, where she is now getting the help she needs.

We should all be so lucky.