Sitting Still In Fountain Park: Homelessness and Addiction in Chestertown By Christa Blackmon

It’s just after 5 pm at Fountain Park on a warm September evening, and the mosquitoes are beginning to gather. I hear someone call my name from the driver’s seat of a car that’s just been parked. It’s Wanda Boyer, a recovered addict and community organizer who works with some of the county’s most vulnerable people. She’s here to shed light on how homelessness and addiction interact and intensify each other in Chestertown.

A few years ago, Wanda worked as a behavioral service provider for Chestetown’s now-closed Eastern Shore Psychological Services where Whitssitt Center now provides addiction treatment.*  She points to a window just above the Sugar Doodles ice cream parlor and tells me that she and her colleagues could see those who were suffering gather in the park from their office. Many of them were homeless, and the staff used to come down with food for them. We’re sitting on a bench sectioned into two seats, and Wanda laments that there used to be more without the little barrier.

“Homelessness has been here for a long time,” she says. “But it’s more visible now.”

Just behind us, we hear the laughter of a group of men sitting on the other side of the park.

“Does that look like homelessness to you?” she asks as one of them passes by and waves hello. “But it is.”

If you’re out and about between 8 am and 1 pm, the only people you’re likely to see are parents on a school run, staff from the shops and offices on High Street, and Washington College students. But after 5 pm, you might see a very different set of people: the homeless and the nearly homeless, settling into spots where they won’t be pushed out.

Chief of Police Ron Dixon says that in his 28 years of law enforcement in neighboring rural counties in Maryland, he had rarely fielded calls about the homeless. It wasn’t that these things didn’t exist in Caroline or Queen Anne’s county. He was acquainted with people and organizations working on getting families and individuals into safe and stable housing. But it wasn’t until he came to Chestertown that it became an issue in his profession.

As of today, Kent County has no year-round dedicated homeless shelter.

Although Wanda never experienced homelessness herself, their struggle is still near to her heart. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, people struggling with homelessness are at greater risk of death by overdose.

Not every homeless person in Chestertown is battling drugs, but the two paths often converge. So, too, does mental health, she reminds me. Mental health issues, like a Vietnam veteran’s PTSD, drive people to use, which leads to losing one’s family, friends, and home. The reverse is also true: Loss of homes leads to poor mental health, which leads to drugs.

Poverty connects them all.

Across Wanda’s wrist is a bent silver spoon as a bracelet to remind her of the eight years she spent “running” as an addict. She had taken the spoon from her aunt’s house and when she met a crafty man whose struggle she recognised, she asked him to turn it into a piece of jewelry for her. She has learned to “sit still”, she declares to me, and this humble souvenir is as simple as it is beautiful.

Wanda thinks back to her time at Kent County’s only in-patient addiction treatment facility, where she was sent after she finally found the courage to ask a social worker she knew from the community for help. Today, there are 52 beds at the centre, and 12 of those are dedicated to “crisis stablization”. Although they will take patients from anywhere in Maryland, Kent County and other Eastern Shore residents are who mostly come through their doors.

Usually, these are individuals who are being sent to treatment by their families, and so are not coming from a homeless state. While the centre can’t stop someone who wants to end their treatment against medical advice and thus become homeless, they do not discharge patients without putting together a plan for housing. At the time of my conversation in early September with the director, Carla Thorpe, the centre had empty beds and was taking people from their waiting list, but things can change quickly.

In 2021, the Maryland Department of Health counted the highest number of unintentional drug and alcohol-related intoxication deaths in its state history. Preliminary statistics for 2022 show a slight decrease and remain steady in 2023. Although fatalities are predictably higher in areas in and around Baltimore, the preliminary numbers indicate that it is still increasing in some counties on the Eastern Shore: Caroline, Somerset, Wicomico, and Worcester. The counties of Dorchester, Cecil, Kent, and Talbot decreased from 2022-2023, with the most dramatic in Cecil. Only Queen Anne’s County remained unchanged.

Chief Dixon also tells me that emergency services here in Chestertown are most often called for incidents where someone is under the influence of alcohol or cannabis. Heroin and fentanyl are also common substances in the area, with Fentanyl being the easiest to purchase at between $20 and $100 a gram, yet only a few “grains of sand” are needed to achieve an effect. Fentanyl is a pain medication similar to morphine that is available both by prescription and can be made illegally. It is one of the substances involved in the national opioid crisis, which has hit rural areas much harder than their urban and suburban neighbours.

If you walk past the Sheriff’s Office on High Street this month, you’ll see a banner on the lawn that says “Kent Goes Purple”. The local firehouse has also declared its support for Kent Goes Purple. Another purple sign on Washington Avenue informs passers-by that 90% of addicts started using in their teens. You might see similar banners as you cross the bridge into Queen Anne’s and other counties on the Mid-Shore. This is a prevention focused awareness campaign that primarily targets school-aged children and their families. In its early days, much of its information was about opioid abuse but today it is much more generalised to include alcohol and other substances.

But Wanda is sceptical of the campaign.

“I wore jumpsuit orange in jail and now we’ve got counties going purple,” Wanda sighs. “It makes me feel sick.”

During the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, it wasn’t just dealers who were put on trial and imprisoned, it was addicts too. Black Americans suffering from an addiction to crack were especially demonized and disproportionately penalized. The opioid crisis that began in the early 2000’s has received a different response, one that is less punitive and more focused on “harm reduction”. Carl Erik Fisher, the author of The Urge: Our History of Addiction, himself a former addict as well as a practising psychiatrist, credits this patient-centered approach to the AIDS rights movement that began in the 1980’s. Yet despite this shift, our society still has a lot of work to do in acknowledging past injustices and rectifying today’s racial health inequalities.

While opioid-related deaths are predominantly white, a 2020 report from the Maryland Opioid Operational Command Center found that black males over the age of 55 were the most impacted group. This matches with the national trend of overdose deaths, with the rate of black male deaths tripling from 2015 to 2020. Multiple forms of bias may also be preventing black people from accessing addiction treatment.

The National Institute of Drugs and Addiction, the lead federal agency supporting scientific research on drug use and its consequences, reported that 20.4 million Americans had been diagnosed with substance abuse disorder in 2019, yet only 10.3% received treatment.

If we look at substance abuse disorder through the cold hard lens of data and dollar signs, this lack of addiction treatment is costing us dearly. The US Department of Health and Human Services estimates the economic impact of substance abuse is $249 billion per year for alcohol disorders and $193 billion for illicit drugs. This includes the cost to healthcare systems, law enforcement, and the criminal justice system. Both substance abuse prevention and drug treatment can reduce these costs, potentially saving the country billions of dollars.

Chief Dixon believes that substance abuse efforts have been effective in decreasing the number of overdose deaths in Kent County since its peak in 2021. Specifically, he credits Narcan (also known by its pharmaceutical name Naxolone) an opioid overdose-reversing nasal spray, and training in how to use the medication in case of emergency in the hands of the public. Both the local Department of Health and the group Recovery In Motion currently offer Narcan training and distribution.

“Chestertown and Kent County need to get better at making something for all, need to stop focusing on remaining historical,” says Wanda. As we make our way home, she starts telling me about the slave market that used to be at the customs house and the slave tunnels underneath our feet. I think she’s on the right track.

History is one of my favourite subjects to teach to young people because we are all active in making it. Who we include in our historical stories impacts who we include in our present. And one day, the youth of Kent County will be talking about Chestertown in 2024 as “history”.

Homelessness is an economic problem. Homelessness is a public health problem. Homelessness is a moral problem. And homelessness is our problem. Let’s make it history.

Christa Blackmon is a new arrival to Chestertown. She has a Master’s Degree in Social Anthropology and experience in writing about human rights. She currently works as a secondary school teacher.

(Ed. Note: To find out about the newly founded Shelter Alliance group, email Carol Niemand at  [email protected].)

* The Kent County Health Department A.F Whitsitt Center. The A.F. Whitsitt Center is a licensed, CARF-accredited inpatient residential program. The facility operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and provides treatment services to adults ages 18 and older suffering from Substance Use and Co-occurring disorders. Walk-ins are currently being accepted on weekdays from 8-11:30 a.m. and Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:30-9:00 p.m. Please feel free to call 410-778-6404 with any questions