HJBR Sep/Oct 2021

DIALOGUE Editor Do you or would you ever recommend legalization of some of these street drugs, so they’re regulated by the FDA? Clark I do not think that it’s a good idea. Let’s take opioids, for example. There are medicinal uses for that, but when you legal- ize them from an illicit or street scenario, they’re not going through any kind of FDA process. At least I know as a practicing phy- sician, if I give you four milligrams of mor- phine, you’re going to get four milligrams of morphine. If you go to your drug dealer, you have no idea what you’re going to get. So, I don’t think that legalizing it would ever curb the overdose number, because there’s no process for regulating its amounts. Editor But if it was legalized, it would be regulated, wouldn’t it? Clark I’m not sure if it would be regulated to that extent, right? You’re still going to have illicit drug trade. They’ve even found in the states where they have legalized marijuana, both for therapeutic and recreational use, that there’s still a marijuana trade out there. There’re still people selling it on the street straight from the plant, not through the legal avenues, so I don’t know that you can bypass that by simply legalizing it. Editor Let’s talk mental health. You said the pandemic has increased the number of calls received by your office. How have you handled this increase? What are you seeing? Clark The two areas where I’m affected men- tal health-wise is we do something called the order of protective custody, which is essentially an affidavit that allows us to get an individual in the community who is hav- ing a mental health crisis from their location to a hospital. In 2019, we did 1,143 orders of protective custody or OPCs, and in 2020, we did 1,213. I know that’s not a substantial increase, and a lot of that probably has to do with the fact that most of folks that were having mental health crises did not go to the hospital. As a matter of fact, hospitals, at the beginning of the pandemic, were seen as places you didn’t want to go, because that’s where all the virus was. I think that’s why we saw just a slight increase there. If you look at the second piece of the mental health system, as it pertains to the holding in a hospital of a person involun- tarily for mental health reasons (we call that an emergency certificate, and the one the coroner does is called the coroner’s emer- gency certificate), in 2019, we did 7,861, and in 2020, we did 7,650, so, almost a 200 decrease in that statistic. Again, I think that was because at the very beginning of the pandemic, a lot of individuals were fearful of going to the hospital, so they sat at home and had their mental health crisis. A lot of services, outpatient services and whatnot, were shut down or moved to virtual Zoom kind of scenarios. We didn’t see an increase in the numbers, but we certainly can tell you that it doesn’t mean that there were crises not happening in our community. The good news for East Baton Rouge Par- ish is the fact that in February of this year, 2021, after a couple of years, the taxpayers had approved a tax in East Baton Rouge Parish to pay for The Bridge Center, which is a mental health receiving facility that spe- cializes in crisis management. We now have a facility specific to our parish that allows individuals who are in crisis to go and be evaluated — another location in our parish to help these individuals. Obviously, there’s never enough beds, but it’s nice that East Baton Rouge now has this asset, so we can get individuals help quicker. Editor You mentioned earlier that the coroner’s office in Louisiana is charged with examining all alleged victims of sexually oriented criminal offenses. How many encounters of this type does your office typically see in a year, and are cases up or down? Clark Our sexual assault program, like I said, legislatively came into play between 2015 and 2017. There was some tweaking that happened, so let’s go back a couple of years. If we look in 2018, that year, we did 249 sexual assault kits, but the individu- als that we were servicing at that time were only adults and adolescents; we had not started our pediatric program that year. In “Motor vehicle collisions, believe it or not, went up in 2020...East Baton Rouge Parish set an all-time homicide rate...we’re well on our way to setting a new record again this year...2021 is looking like another record-breaking year in the overdose category.”