Peter Volkmann, the police chief of the small upstate New York town of Chatham, has a radical strategy for policing the American opioid epidemic: He doesn’t.
Instead, he invites addicts to come to his office, turn over their drugs, and ask for help. He then makes sure they get the medical assistance they need to detox, and enroll in rehab programs so they can eventually stop using all together. “We’re not going to arrest you for possession—we’re going to help you,” Volkmann says in a new video about the program, produced by Fusion. “Treatment is [the] best option for recovery. We’re going to help one person at a time, one day at a time. That’s our strategic plan.”
Volkmann launched the program, called Chatham Cares 4 U (or CC4U), in the summer of 2016, as he watched the growing opioid epidemic ravage the region, which is located just south of Albany. Columbia County, home to about 60,000 people, has seen a 227 percent increase in opioid-related deaths in the last ten years, according to the Healthy Capital District Initiative. “Everyone here knows somebody that’s struggling with an addiction,” says Volkmann, who has a master’s degree in social work and is himself in long-term recovery from alcoholism. “We can’t arrest our way out of this; it’s just impossible.”
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