Drug Addiction In Jails Puts Colorado Sheriffs On The Front Line

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO – By John Herrick for The Colorado Independent. On a warm spring day in 2015, Sarah Blair was stranded at a Safeway in Thornton with no car and a dead cell phone. Her plan to get more heroin had fallen through. She felt sick and agitated.

Withdrawal was setting in. Inside the grocery store at the checkout lane, she grabbed a woman’s purse out of her cart. She matched the keys to a car in the parking lot and slid behind the wheel. But when the woman came running out, Blair said she just sat there. She was exhausted. It was nearly her 21st birthday and she had been using heroin for three years.

“I gave her her purse,” Blair said during a recent interview at her home in Colorado Springs. “I just sat there and lit a cigarette and waited for the cops to come get me.”

Over the next several days, she went through withdrawal in the Adams County jail. She was throwing up on her cell floor. She remembers not eating or sleeping for days. The officers gave her Gatorade, but she couldn’t hold it down. She was dehydrated, underweight, and restless, she said. Barely able to walk, she went to go see the nurse because her fingers on each hand were clenched together like claws.

Blair said the nurse told her she was about to have a heart attack. Not long after she was in an ambulance heading to the hospital.

She survived. But, over the last five years, at least four people suffering from drug and alcohol withdrawal have died in Colorado’s county jails. While each death has its own particulars, together they can also be seen as the result of a confluence of larger factors.

The first is that Colorado is grappling with an opioid crisis that claimed a record number of lives in 2017. So far this year, nearly two people have died every day from an opioid overdose.

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Nathan Evans, a 27-year-old from Denver, inside the Denver County jail. (Photo by Evan Semón)