PORTLAND — Nonprofit Central City Concern closed its publicly funded Northeast Portland facility where intoxicated people were brought to sober up as an alternative to jail on Friday and ended its roving van service that transported people there.
The agency said the sobering station and the Central City Concern Hopper Inebriate Emergency Response Service, also known as CHIERS, are no longer available. There currently isn’t a plan in place to replace them.
The sobering station and van service had operated by Central City Concern since 1985 and was meant to provide a safe space for people to recover from alcohol or drug use. More than 3,000 people used it in 2018 and most spent six to eight hours there, according to the nonprofit. The city of Portland largely paid for its operations.
The closure comes after Central City Concern officials told representatives with the City of Portland, Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties as well as other cities and medical service providers last month that they planned to close the sobering station imminently. Nonprofit officials cited concerns for the safety of patients and staff, who they said were no longer able to give the level of medical care required by most people who arrived at the center.
The agency said they received more and more patients in the midst of a mental crisis, agitated from opioid or meth use or a combination of both, leading to increased safety risks.
“More and more, we’re seeing people ending up in the sobering center when they should be in places where they can be given medication and a higher level of monitoring until their crisis subsides,” Dr. Amanda Risser, Central City Concern’s senior medical director of substance use disorder services told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an interview last week. “We don’t have medicine, we don’t have padded safety rooms and we don’t have the resources at the sobering center to do the hands-on intervention that happens in psychiatric centers. It just isn’t an acceptable risk anymore.”
She said the agency recently implemented new screening criteria for accepting patients that weeded out people at high risk to threaten or harm themselves or others.
Risser said the station accepted eight to 10 people a day before the new screening was implemented and but just two to three afterward.
“It’s difficult to close a program that has been such an important part of the community for decades,” said Central City Concern spokesperson Susan Wickstrom in a statement. “But closing the Sobering Station makes room for a new approach to treating people in crisis and incapacitated by drugs and alcohol. We look forward to supporting our partners in this effort.”
The agency’s current contract with the City of Portland expires June 30 and it had previously told city officials that it didn’t plan to renew their deal to operate the sobering center or CHIERS van service.
The Portland Police Bureau announced Dec. 23 that its officers would take inebriated people to hospital emergency rooms.
The nonprofit had contracts for sobering services with Portland and Washington County and sent invoices to all other agencies that transported patients there. The Washington County contract was sent to expire Jan. 21.
Central City Concern’s Detox Center in North Portland will remain open. Hooper Detox is a subacute center that admits patients voluntarily for medical treatment of their withdrawal symptoms. Patients can stay there for days and receive medications in a center staffed with nurses, physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants.
