A new tax on guns and ammunition in Colorado is set to take effect in the spring. Voters approved the tax, with most of the proceeds going to support services for crime victims and other social programs.

By Rae Ellen Bichell | KFF Health News (Via AP Storyshare)

Colorado’s new voter-approved gun initiative has a target unlike those of previous measures meant to reduce gun violence. The tax on guns and ammunition is meant to generate revenue to support cash-strapped victim services, and it’s an open question whether it will affect firearms sales.

The 6.5% tax on manufacturers and sellers — including pawnbrokers — of guns, gun parts, and ammunition will generate an estimated $39 million a year. The money is aimed primarily at crime victim services, including groups that help victims of domestic violence. Some of it is earmarked for behavioral and mental health for veterans and youth, and a sliver will support school security.

Firearm deaths have been rising in Colorado since at least 2006, growing more quickly than the state’s population, and with a notable bump in homicides early in the covid pandemic, which prompted a national gun-buying spree. The tax could have public health effects beyond generating money for social services, researchers said. But they don’t know for sure because only one other state, California, has a gun-and-ammo tax — an 11% tax that has been in effect only since July.

Emmy Betz directs the Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and wonders if the tax will change consumer behavior. “The question is whether that will change gun sales or not,” she said.

A federal tax has been levied on gun manufacturers for more than a century — currently at 10% for pistols/revolvers and 11% for other kinds of firearms, plus cartridges and shells.

Colorado state Rep. and Majority Leader Monica Duran, a Democrat, co-sponsored the new law, scheduled to take effect in April. Voters approved it in November as Proposition KK. The connection between firearms and domestic violence is stark: Nationally, every month an average of 57 women are killed by an intimate partner using a gun. Researchers have also found that 59% of mass shootings between 2014 and 2019 in the United States were related to domestic violence. 

Support groups for victims of domestic violence and other crimes receive funding through the 1984 federal Victims of Crime Act. Those dollars mostly come from fines and penalties from convicted federal criminals and fluctuate annually depending on what cases the Department of Justice pursues. Federal prosecutions and fines have dropped, so the state’s pot of money has shrunk from nearly $57 million in 2018, when Duran was first elected, to about $14 million in 2024 — a 76% drop.

But the need for victim support services has grown, said Duran, who is a gun owner and a survivor of domestic violence who used such services to escape homelessness.

Colorado’s new tax is what economists call a “Pigouvian” tax, which seeks to compensate financially for the societal toll or damage a product causes. For example, people who drive cars pay a tax on gas, which goes toward repairing roads.

“It’s not because you’re a bad driver that we’re taxing gasoline. It’s because we need this money to be able to improve our infrastructure in ways that allow people to continue to use that product,” said Rosanna Smart, an economist who co-directs the Rand Gun Policy in America initiative.

She said Colorado’s gun tax is similar: It supports the social infrastructure that’s required in a society with firearms.

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people can carry a gun outside their homes for self-defense. Smart said the decision made it harder to pass laws restricting gun possession and highlighted the importance of historical precedent. Both the California and Colorado tax laws cite taxes passed by eight states and then-independent Hawaii between 1844 and 1926.

The actual effect of the Colorado and California laws won’t be known for some time. But should other states pursue similar policies, researchers think focusing taxes on specific weapons or places might be more effective at reducing harm, rather than simply generating revenue.

Smart, for example, found that if the goal is to reduce harm, a more optimal design would be to follow the lead of alcohol policies and have varying tax levels based on an item’s likelihood to cause harm.

Adam Rosenberg, a doctoral candidate in economics at Stanford University, found doing so at the national level, by rejiggering the federal tax to be 13.3% on handguns and nothing on long guns, would prevent deaths while holding industry profits steady.

The Colorado tax applies to firearms dealers, manufacturers, and ammunition vendors that make at least $20,000 a year (excluding sales to law enforcement or active-duty military). Neither state officials nor lawmakers nor industry groups could confirm what fraction of firearm businesses that represents. According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, about 2,200 firearms dealers or pawnbrokers and manufacturers of ammunition/firearms operate in the state. Ammunition sellers aren’t tallied in that figure.

Some firearms businesses worry the tax will drive people across state lines to purchase guns.

“We’ve already got people saying, ‘Well, we can run over to Utah or Wyoming instead,’” said Frank Sadvar of Northwest Outfitters, a gun store and pawn shop in Craig. The city is a 40-minute drive to Wyoming and 1½ hours to Utah.

“The way it was worded on the ballots, it looked really good,” he said. But Sadvar suspects the revenue will fall short of the $39 million estimated because supporters didn’t factor in sales lost to other states.

In Cortez, which is a half-hour drive from New Mexico, Jesse Fine said he’s heard people say they’d rather drive there to buy a gun than pay the tax in Colorado — even though they’d face a seven-day waiting period there.

Fine, who manages Goods for the Woods, an outdoor gear shop carrying a range of firearms and hunting equipment, said he believes the tax discriminates against gun owners who are exercising their civil rights.

“It makes it hard for a mom-and-pop shop to stay in play,” he said. “We’re going to take the biggest hit because we’re not a big corporation.”

Victim services organizations said they will be in a tight spot financially until the new tax’s revenue starts to fully flow in 2026.

Courtney Sutton, public policy director of the Colorado Organization for Victim Assistance, said most victim service agencies in the state, many of which are members of COVA, “heavily, heavily rely on” the federal funds that have been ballooning up and down.

“We did get $6 million from the state budget, but that’s not very much across 215 programs,” she said, referencing the state’s four victim services coalitions.

The new tax is estimated to bring in $30 million a year to such groups.

Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center executive director Emily Tofte Nestaval said she hopes the new tax revenue will help the center restart a program for people sorting out protection orders, housing issues, and name changes, among other things. Nestaval said that, for now, crime victims in Colorado are on their own. 

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

SOCIAL: 

In April, Colorado is set to start a new tax on guns and ammunition — the second state, behind California, to do so. The goal is to raise revenue, but the tax could have public health consequences. @kffhealthnews @raelnb

The post New Colorado Gun Law Aims To Shore Up Victim Services appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

A friend once told me, “I believe everyone on the planet should have one day a week to do whatever they want.” I think they said this because they know I work way too much. I chose journalism as a career, which means I work. A lot.

Yesterday, I decided to take their advice and go for a walk through Sandstone Ranch. It was great to get out in the sunshine, and it made me grateful for the treasures right in my backyard.

One of those treasures is Chautauqua. But Chautauqua is more than just the Dining Hall, the Auditorium, and the Flatiron’s Loop hike. (All pretty great things.)  Recently, I managed to take yet another rare day off with a weekend stay in one of the cottages — which, by the way, have no TVs. But who needs a TV when you’re staying at Chautauqua?

While I wish I could have stayed longer in that adorable cottage, it was a perfect mini-staycation. And it reminded me that I don’t always have to get on a plane to get away. I can drive just 17 miles from Erie and find a retreat that people from all over the country fly in to see.

Today, I joined a faith-based group that is organizing to protect the rights of all. As part of our gathering, we did a community exercise where we moved around the room without speaking — first quickly, then slowly — until we stopped and faced the person in front of us. While there was some awkwardness in staring into a stranger’s face, as the host narrated the purpose behind the exercise, I could see everyone not only connecting to the message but also to each other.

The United States is not in good health right now, and the future of democracy looks increasingly uncertain. But being in this room with others, many of whom have a different take on faith than I do, was deeply moving. Connecting in this way reminded me of something important:

Right now, more than ever, we need connection. Humanity is not lost among America’s citizens. It’s under siege. But as humans, we do, in fact, need each other. We are more than data points.

The Colorado Chautauqua is hosting its All-Inclusive Women’s Retreat. The first one scheduled for 2025 is April 10th-13th. If you hurry, you can get a spot reserved. They do take the time to talk with you before signing up so you can feel confident about the experience before committing.

 I have to admit, when I first heard about it, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

It’s only as I’ve gotten older that I’ve truly come to understand the power of sisterhood. As a younger woman, maybe I lacked the maturity to see it, but now, I know that my female friendships have been my anchor, carrying me through even the hardest times.

They’ve been hosting this retreat three times a year for the past four years, and it’s now selling out regularly. The groups are intentionally small, just 18 women per retreat, and guests have ranged from their early twenties to their eighties.

While it takes a bit of bravery to commit to a three-day weekend retreat, the staff at Colorado Chautauqua Association work hard to ensure everyone feels comfortable with their decision, even before purchasing a ticket.

I spoke with Liz Purvis and Rohini Grace to learn more about this experience. While I was a skeptic at first, I now hope to gift myself this special opportunity.

I could hear the passion in Rohini’s voice as we spoke over the phone. They described a place where women can reconnect with themselves — beyond the roles of mother, wife, or professional. A space where they can remember who they are outside of life’s daily demands.

But what they were most excited to share was the curriculum. They carefully design experiences that take women out of their everyday routines, offering opportunities we rarely get in our normal workspaces.

The retreat includes yoga, nature walks, forest bathing, a fully customized menu tailored to each woman’s needs (without having to do the dishes!), a concert, and an inspirational talk. All activities are curated for spiritual, emotional, and mental well-being. But everything is optional. If you’d rather curl up under a tree with a book, you can.

The goal is simple: to create a safe space where women can nurture themselves, reconnect with nature, and truly experience it, something we in Boulder County often live close to, play in, and marvel at, yet sometimes forget to pause and embrace.

I spoke with Lori Harrison, a three-time returning retreat participant. Her first time attending was a gift from a friend, and she wasn’t sure what she hoped to gain from the experience. But since that first retreat, she has returned twice more and, in the process, she has built a circle of friends she now considers her rock.

These friendships were formed at the Women’s Retreat, but what truly came out of it was the deep bonding and connection that extended far beyond the weekend itself.

“Having the freedom to let go of all of that and just remember who we are — without our job title, without our partner, without our kids. There’s a part of us that is more than those things.”

While participants have the choice to bunk solo or stay in the larger shared cabin, she highly recommended the latter, or at least staying with a buddy. Letting go in this way can bring moments of vulnerability, and having a friend nearby can offer support through those experiences.

What got Lori the most excited was talking about the Mala beads they each create. Mala Beads per The Monestary Store, are described as; From the Sanskrit “heavenly garland,” malas are used in Buddhism to count repetitions of mantras—short sacred phrases—or prostrations. Traditional malas have beads crafted from seeds, gemstones, or wood, and are often finished with an additional “guru” bead and a special knot and/or tassel. The size of our beads and the length of the string varies to accommodate different practitioners. Full malas have 108 beads; most wrist malas have 21 beads, but it can vary.” She lit up as she described crafting the Mala Beads — at first struggling to make it, but eventually laughing it off and realizing it all came together once she let go of the outcome.

Rohini summed it up perfectly: “It is so beautiful to watch strangers come together and leave as sisters.”

Fortunately, Chautauqua isn’t reserved solely for women. They offer corporate retreats, family retreats, and any gathering where people want to come together to create community. It’s a perfect destination for both locals and visitors alike.

https://www.chautauqua.com/chautauqua-womens-retreat

https://www.chautauqua.com/group-retreats

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The post Rest for Revolution; Find yourself at Chautauqua appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

My journey toward child-free thinking did not begin in the parking lot of Gunther Toody’s, but it’s as good a place as any to start this story. I sat in the driver’s seat under the orange neon light of the ’50s diner and had a full-body anxiety attack. I was dating a woman whom I very much loved, but over the past few months, her paranoid delusions had become more frequent. I had sat on the floor beside her for more than one psychotic episode. These episodes left her unable to remember who or where she was and left my ears ringing from the screams. 

Now, she was over a week late. One moment of carelessness and I had ruined my life. I sat in my car, unable to breathe, my body clenched up so tight I thought I would collapse into myself. A week later, she got her period, and I swore I would never put myself in that position again. By year’s end, we had broken up. I would later learn that she had been off her beta-blockers for months and lying about going to therapy.

Like most young Americans, I grew up thinking that having children was just the way things were done, something I would get around to someday. As I grew into adulthood, I realized that having kids was not something I felt in my core that I had to do. I also understood the immense responsibility that went along with being a parent. The trauma of the pregnancy scare afforded me time to reflect on what I wanted for my life.

Eighteen months after the breakup, I made up my mind. I was at a family get-together at a cousin’s remote ranch home. I had a chance to spend time with their eldest child. He was a nice boy, about six years old, with a good personality. I have some minor skills as a photographer, and I showed him how to take photos on my digital camera. He took me into the house and showed me his LEGO collection. We played a board game called Mister Mouth, where you flicked plastic bugs into a spinning frog’s head. Then, we spent a half-hour searching for a Hot Wheels cartoon on Netflix.

My cousin and their spouse are good parents, and they are raising a good son. Still, I could not imagine spending hours of my life, day after day, looking at LEGOs and playing Mister Mouth. I tried to imagine the boy as my own son, a little tyke who would run to his dad’s arms when he came home from work, but the thought inspired no paternal feelings. 

I decided to schedule a vasectomy. 

I have been told more than once that I would be a good father, and I do take it as a compliment. I might be a good commercial diver, too, but you won’t find me welding oil rig pipes in zero-visibility waters off of Galveston Bay. When people say I’d be a good father, they mean I’m conscientious, I’m reasonably good with children, and I have slightly more intelligence than a sack of cement. I am fine with other people’s children — for the most part. The nice thing about other people’s children is that I can visit them, and then put them in my rearview mirror and go home. 

I know for my own sake that I should not be a parent. I hate loud noises and irrationality. I can state with certainty that I could not spend my life caring for a severely disabled child. I would not enjoy spending years raising a child only to have some surly teen say how much they hate me. I enjoy waking up on a Sunday and finding my home as quiet as a library. I enjoy coming home from work to an empty house where I can sit down and do nothing. I have a hard enough time getting myself dressed, fed, and out the door in the morning; the thought of doing that for another human being makes me break into a cold sweat. 

Does this make me selfish? Yes, it does. Am I irresponsible? In many areas, yes. I can only say that I am responsible enough for my lack of responsibility and self-aware enough to get myself snipped. I will gladly counter-pose this against the untold hordes of men and women who think their fertility is the only excuse they need to bring a human life into the world. 

Will I change my mind? This is a possibility I cannot rule out, and it’s why I thought long and hard about this choice. I decided that all things being equal, it would be better to regret not having children than to regret having children: the former might be sad, but the latter is a living hell. I have since learned that thousands of other child-free people have arrived at the same conclusion independently. In some ways, we take the idea of parenthood more seriously than many parents.

A word of warning: I would tell any man that they should not get a vasectomy just so they can have unprotected sex. I chose a vasectomy because I have chosen not to have children, and it is my way of taking ownership of that choice. The difference lies in thinking short-term vs long-term.

I have noticed some odd misconceptions about vasectomies, so time addressing them would be well-spent. First, a vasectomy is not a castration. The doctor is severing two tubes, the vas deferens, that carry sperm from each testicle to the shaft. The incisions required to cut the tubes are very small. Sperm makes up a tiny fraction of semen, so orgasms will look and feel exactly the same. Finally, will a vasectomy make you feel like less of a man? Not in the slightest.

The child-free community on Reddit has been a great help. They have a resources page listing doctors in each US state who will perform sterilizations. I picked a urologist in the Boulder/Denver area and scheduled a consultation.

Two weeks later, I was sitting in a doctor’s office, filled with apprehension. Every child-free person has heard horror stories of doctors who won’t even consider performing the snip unless the patient is married with eight kids under their belt. Would this doctor ask if I might change my mind? Oh, how they love to ask this. Would he tell me I’m too young at 32? (How old do I have to be to know what’s right for my own body?) Would he tell me life is not worth living if I don’t procreate?

The door opened, and the urologist sat down.

“So,” he said, “Ready to call it quits, huh?”

I leaned back in my chair, making a steeple with my fingers, and smiled. 

“Yes,” I said. 

The rest of the appointment was boilerplate: I was told that while reversible in theory, I should consider a vasectomy permanent. I was told that the procedure would take effect in eight or so weeks once the remaining sperm in my tubes had been ‘flushed out,’ so to speak. Finally, the doctor told me he’d done thousands of vasectomies, and none had failed. Would I please not be the first, he asked. I agreed. The doctor left, and a nurse came by to put a date on the calendar.

* * *

I was trying to sell a rare electric guitar. I took it to a shop in Boulder County for refurbishing. The owner of the repair shop was intrigued by the guitar, so we started a conversation about it. A similar guitar was used to play the opening riff from Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.”

The owner looks up at the clock. “Man, I wish I could keep talking…” A look comes across his face, not sadness, but resignation. “… But I gotta close up and pick up my kids.”

Later that week, another man arrived at my house. I’ve had the guitar up on Craigslist, and he’s looking to buy it. I can tell the man is excited to see it. I showed him how the guitar can be plugged into a synthesizer to play the bassline for “Jam On It” by Newcleus. He digs it. I’ve sold instruments to people who barely know the black keys from the white on a piano, so I’d love to sell this guitar to someone who cares. 

“Do you play anywhere in the area? Any bands?” I ask.

“I used to; I played all over the Front Range,” he says. I see that familiar look fall across his face. “Now I have kids.”

* * *

I had been encouraged to shave ahead of the vasectomy. After looking at my safety razor for five minutes, I decided to leave it to the professionals. A yard sign on the side of the parkway led me to a waxing clinic. I drove there after work and booked an appointment. 

I arrived for my first-ever waxing session at 8 AM on Sunday and was taken into a back room. I was given a wipe to clean myself and then instructed to sit on the table, naked from the waist down, with a towel over my Netherlands. Since I was only having my testicles waxed and not the full “Brazilian,” I was told I would save some money.

The waxing specialist began by rubbing in a cream to limit the pain. When I get a flu shot, I watch the nurse put the needle into my arm. It’s been that way since I was a toddler. For the waxing, I opted not to look, just laid back and kept my eyes closed. I felt the specialist apply a hot wax, followed a few seconds later by a dull sting. It was nothing too bad, and I was beginning to wonder when the prep would end, and the waxing begin. 

The specialist spoke to me. “Just a couple more, and we’ll be done.” 

How about that? 

I dressed, returned to the lobby, and paid. The specialist asked if I’d like to schedule my next appointment. I told her I was good for now. 

The day after my waxing, I arrived at the hospital at 9:20 AM. The place was too crowded for my taste, so I wore a mask inside. I was taken into an examining room and given a “prize bag” containing an ice pack and two containers for sperm samples. I was warned more than once to call ahead before dropping off my samples and to never, ever just leave a sample on the receptionist’s desk if they were out to lunch.

I was told I could leave my shoes on. Clearly, they didn’t expect this to take long. I lay down on the examining table with my pants and underwear around my ankles, ready for the moment I’d been expecting for so long. 

Yes, I took a selfie, unflattering fluorescent lights be damned. 

The urologist and nurse came in and wasted no time. The procedure began with a feeling of rubber bands snapping against my scrotum, which was a one-time-use syringe numbing the incision site. Then came a volley of pinches as the doctor tried to isolate the first tube for cutting.

I have heard the sensation of a vasectomy compared to having your guts yanked out through your ballsack. I can confirm this is true. As with the waxing, I had no desire to look at what was happening, so it was left to my imagination what all the poking, prodding, twisting, and pulling was about. In total, it was no more emotionally uncomfortable than a hernia check during a physical, let alone a prostate exam.

I felt another snap from a numbing injection, and the doctor made small talk. Whenever a doctor makes small talk, they are trying to distract you. Fine by me. 

“So, how many kids do you have, Ambrose?”

Staring at the ceiling, I replied with no hesitation: “I have exactly as many kids as I want.”

The left tube was done first, with some difficulty. The right tube was dispatched with no trouble. 

I had expected to be laid out in pain for the rest of the day, but with two Advil and an afternoon in bed, I felt fine. I’m the kid who watched his nurse give the flu shot, so sure, I have a high pain tolerance. Your mileage may vary. The bruising cleared up in a matter of weeks. 

By sunset, I got dressed and drove out to the mall. 

I’m writing in a booth at Red Robin when the manager comes over to talk to me. I told her I remembered when Red Robin had arcade machines, and we reminisced about the TV sets they used to recess into the floors. 

“Be safe out there,” she said. “Usually, I tell people to go have an adventure, but…”

I put my pen and legal pad away. “I already had my adventure for the day.”

“I hope it was a fun one,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, “it really was.”

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The post Getting Snipped On The Front Range: A Personal Story of Choosing to be Child-Free appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

If you’re involved in the Boulder endurance community, there’s a good chance you have eaten RAD food, and we are not just talking about really delicious grub. RAD, short for Real Athlete Diets, is a local small business providing nutritious athlete meals locally and across the globe.

In a recent interview with the founder and owner of RAD, Kelly Newlon, she stated “I am a chef and I feed athletes.” While that might sound overly simplistic, in a nutshell, this is her business.

Founded based on a love of the endurance community coupled with extensive expertise and credentials in the culinary world, RAD is a staple in the Boulder and greater Front Range endurance community. Whether you’re attending a group run at Runners Roost, or volunteering at a local Colorado trail race, it is not uncommon to see Kelly’s smiling face and taste her scrumptious creations.

In addition to working with pro athletes in the endurance community, RAD has worked with brands such as National Geographic, Patagonia, and Adidas, as well as the United Nations Environmental Program.

Kelly, along with her husband Morgan, founded RAD in 2014. At the time, Kelly was teaching at a culinary school in Boulder and had more free time than she’d had when she worked full-time in the restaurant industry. Friends in the community started asking her to feed them for key training cycles, races, and events in sports ranging from trail running to cycling to swimming. There came a point when she realized she could not sustainably feed these friends while also working her day job. That is when a light bulb went off: she loved feeding athletes, so why not make that into a business?

She asked her husband Morgan to be her business partner and they were off and running. Like a true endurance athlete, Morgan loves saying things are “rad” and thus the company’s name came naturally. They would call it “Real Athlete Diets” or “RAD” for short. The logo design came from a sketch Morgan drew on a napkin at the Boulder restaurant Oak at Fourteenth, a staple in fine American dining located on Boulder’s famous Pearl St. Even their logo origin story is a testament to their humble beginnings and local roots in our beloved town.

Morgan went to work on logistics and bookings while Kelly focused on what she does best; creating incredible food to fuel athletes’ lives. While the company started as a meal service for athletes in the Boulder area, it has evolved into more of a catering and events business. Now on their 10th anniversary,

Kelly just returned from a trip to Europe to support and run the length of the Seine River in Paris to help improve water quality in France. Kelly said she loves traveling with athletes, teams, and brands because it “gives the opportunity to make a difference in their nutrition because you get to work with them for so many meals.”

Besides a love for fueling athletes and the endurance community, the Newlons are dedicated to two big things when it comes to RAD—supporting local and working on environmentally focused projects.

Boulder is not only home to RAD but also their lifeblood. The community here has been and continues to be their biggest supporter, partner, and friend. Whether it be fueling a local pro athlete, providing food for a retail store event, or buying ingredients from local farmers, Boulder and RAD are deeply intertwined. “We would be nothing without Boulder, CO in the Front Range.”

Kelly holds an AOS in Culinary Arts from the Culinary Institute of America and a BA in Business from Purdue University, National Sports Medicine (Sports Nutrition Levels 1, 2, and 3).

Follow RAD on Instagram: @radboulder

For booking inquiries email: kelly@radboulder.com

The post RAD Boulder: Bringing Nutritious Food to the Athlete in All of Us appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

‘My mom has been really encouraging. And she says that we should push to get a cafe at some point’

By CHRISTIAN ARNDT, StorySprint reporter for Sentinel Colorado (Via AP Storyshare)

The Sentinel Story Sprint is a statewide journalism project. Story Sprint brings students from Colorado State University, Community College of Aurora and Colorado College into the Aurora newsroom to cover local stories, alongside veteran journalists. Funded by a grant from the Colorado Media Project, the Sentinel Story Sprint provides a professional newsroom with emerging journalists, and emerging journalists with a professional newsroom.

AURORA | At a unique farmer’s market in a northwest Aurora park, Ron Johnson sits under an umbrella next to an ice box tied to his bike. He’s selling sorrel-flavored ice cream and Popsicles made from strawberries he grows inside his house.

When he started his business as a Rebel Marketplace vendor in Aurora’s Del Mar Park, he named it “Griot.” That’s the Portuguese word for a West-African bard or storyteller. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he joined the “rebels,” wanting to “bring back more hospitality and healthiness to eating.”

Johnson is one of dozens of vendors in the diverse collective who’ve created an unusual weekly market, often boasting homemade products and produce grown in backyards.

“The standard American diet has taken most of us away from our healthier delicious culinary roots,” the Aurora Public Schools nutritionist said. He’s a trained chef, too. “The American diet differs dramatically in quality from traditional and multicultural ways of eating including the traditions of the African diaspora.”

Farmer’s markets tend to boast the same spread of products: fresh produce and homemade confections. But the Rebel Marketplace represents something much more. This is much less a traditional farmers market, but a collective of local vendors looking out for their community. This is backyard to the tables of many looking out for one another.

Founding Principles

The Rebel Marketplace is the brainchild of James Grievous. Every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. he welcomes patrons visiting the market or hovers around his own vendor tent, “Rebels In The Garden.”

Recently, he was offering early carrots and radishes. The tent was created to follow an urban farming principle, which is the concept of creating gardens to grow fresh produce in urban settings like neighborhood backyards.

He started the project in 2015 with three of his kids and two of their friends.

“As they got older, in their early teens, we wanted to transition and teach them business skills and things like that to sell the produce from the work they’re doing,” Grevious said. “And so we went on Nextdoor and said, ‘Hey, we’re thinking about this idea with a farmer’s market here at Del Mar Park,’ and it kind of took off.”

The Rebel Marketplace began with only a handful of gardeners. Now it’s expanded to 28 vendors on a slow week. Each Saturday, there are food trucks, pottery vendors and even succulent stands, all originating from the Aurora area.

Resources for the would-be urban farmers

Grievous’s passion for the project has evolved into a nonprofit group called Urban Symbiosis — a program that utilizes a four-year process to help individuals looking to get into urban farming, which could eventually transfer into joining the Rebel Marketplace to sell crops.

The program donates $500 per year toward urban farmers looking to start their own business to cover seedlings, tools and raised beds. If they want to continue urban farming, the program will continue providing the same amount up to an additional three years for the continuous production of local crops to ensure they are market ready.

With the recent closure of a Walmart on East Colfax Avenue and Havana Street — which Grevious said impacted Aurora residents’ accessibility to fresh produce — his marketplace aims to step in.

Although Grevious and his family have a prominent presence in the marketplace, many vendors build upon the community-centric atmosphere the Rebel Marketplace provides.

Farming from home

Johnson has been participating in the Rebel Marketplace for a few years. Every weekend, he rides his bike to and from his rented kitchen space, near his home, to deliver his frozen treats.

During the week, Johnson uses his own hydroponic system in his home to grow a variety of produce like strawberries and mushrooms, the former being used for his sweet treats, as a part of his “full-circle food service business.” On Saturdays, he spends his day selling his desserts from an ice box attached to his bike.

Johnson, an African American, has taken classes that focus on “health and well-being that offers alternatives based on ancestry and science.” Through those, he’s learned the benefits of using different ingredients for better consumption amongst marginalized communities.

His business does not include dairy products because, as he describes, “ancestors of most minority communities were not cattle farmers and therefore do not have the genetics to properly digest and break down lactose.”

Growing heirloom crops from home

A produce vendor and farmer, Kezia Lozano, started Alegría Gardens three years ago as a means to heal family trauma. Lozano’s father was a migrant farm worker from Tamaulipas, Mexico where Lozano says he was exploited as “cheap labor for wealthy landowners.”

Despite persistence from her parents to avoid farming, she felt a calling as a child to grow produce.

“I finally put my hands in the dirt to grow my own food in 2020, realized the depth of the calling and decided that since I have the privilege of gentleness in land access, I am going to put my efforts into healing that generational trauma and feed my community at the same time,” Lozano said.

Growing heirloom crops and ensuring biodiversity in the food system is a passion of Lozano’s. Some of the various crops she grows are corn, beans, amaranth and squash. According to Lozano, virtually all of her crops are indigenous.

“(Rarámuri crops are) often overlooked and unavailable in conventional markets but were banned from cultivation by the Spanish in Mexico for hundreds of years due to its nutritional and spiritual value,” Lozano said. “It was kept alive in secret by indigenous farmers and I want to honor that ancestral tradition by making it available to the Mexican-American community here.”

Starting out young

Fifteen-year-old Justine Pipping, vendor and founder of Marshmallow Express, stands in the shade at her booth with homemade marshmallows with flavors like watermelon, matcha and birthday cake.

Pipping began her business in high school, where she makes homemade marshmallows for her classmates and friends. She learned about a program that her school provides that includes a trip to Barcelona, inspiring her to create her own small business to help her fund the trip for herself. Now, she sells marshmallows for the Aurora community.

With the help of Rebel Marketplace and other events around the Aurora area, she hopes to expand her business into something more with the help and support of her own family.

“My mom has been really encouraging. And she says that we should push to get a cafe at some point,” Pipping said. “We’re mostly thinking about how it’ll look and we also want a safe space for kids my age to go to relax.”

At a crossroads

The Rebel Marketplace is at a “crossroads” at this point, according to Grevious, in regard to foot traffic and sales. They are gathering data and information to measure presence within their marketplace.

The Rebel Marketplace is beginning its fifth year, and this year is the first time the marketplace will run every Saturday this summer. The project has experienced some issues with the city permitting, as well as a change in foot traffic lately. Grievous looks to sustain the marketplace’s vendors and is wanting the marketplace to stay present in the Aurora community.

“So it’s an economic question, it’s a philosophical question and it’s a needs question,” Grievous said. “So figuring out ways that Rebel Marketplace can fill that gap for whatever it is to help those folks who need fresh food and things like that.”

If you go:

Information is at www.rebelmarketplace.com

Generally, the garden marketplace is in Del Mar Park at 312 Del Mar Circle every Saturday from 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. On July 6, the project will offer vendors at Town Center of Aurora Mall.

Christian Arndt attends Colorado State and serves as editor of the Life & Culture desk at the Rocky Mountain Collegian. He found a love for journalism through a passion for writing in high school and through reviewing concerts and films. Since joining the Collegian in early 2023, he has worked to build an audience who trusts him to provide unique twists on local beat coverage. He spends his free time exploring the outdoors, small towns and walking his dog.

The post MARKET SHARE: Rebel Marketplace harvests unique community project in Aurora appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

(Via AP Storyshare)

For those seeking treatments for autoimmune diseases, relief in the form of more affordable drug treatments may be on the way. At a July 3 meeting, Colorado’s Prescription Drug Affordability Review Board voted unanimously to proceed with setting price caps for two prescription drugs: Stelara and Cosentyx.

The board members reviewed separate reports that found both drugs to be both essential and unaffordable for Colorado patients. The investigation found that the average out-of-pocket costs for patients with commercial insurance on Stelara and Cosentyx were $5,875 and $2,801 per year respectively. For a patient without insurance, Cosentyx costs an average of $46,948 per year.

Both Stelara and Cosentyx are used to treat chronic autoimmune diseases, such as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and plaque psoriasis. Neither drug is a quick fix. They are long-term therapies that patients often remain on for years.

According to Megan Purdy, an emergency medicine resident at Denver Health and an ulcerative colitis patient herself, steep prices come with a hidden cost.

“Many of my patients will be on these medications and oftentimes they do come in having missed doses — unable to get insurance coverage for these medications, unable to afford them,” she said.

Cosentyx and Stelara have been on the board’s radar since last summer, when it selected five pharmaceuticals from a list of 604 potentially unaffordable prescriptions. The board’s decision starts a process that will solicit more information from doctors, industry stakeholders and patients before setting price limits on the drugs.

Since 2019, eight U.S. states have established prescription drug affordability review boards and five have included a process for setting upper payment limits. So far, no states have moved passed the affordability review step. Colorado could be the first to establish an upper payment limit for a specific drug.

In February, the board initiated its first ever price-capping process for the arthritis drug Enbrel. The drug’s manufacturer, Amgen, sued the state of Colorado in federal court the following month. The company argued that a state-mandated price interferes with numerous laws and constitutional clauses designed to protect businesses and patent-holders. It called for the state to end the process and dissolve the review board. The case is pending, and oral arguments are scheduled for October.

Advocates expect similar lawsuits from Johnson & Johnson, the patent-holder of Stelara, and Novartis, the patent-holder for Cosentyx.

“It’s a pretty common tactic from pharma to sue when they are faced with price controls,” said Priya Telang, a spokesperson for the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative. “We expect a lawsuit coming from them soon.”

Though no litigation has been filed so far, some opponents are already making their voices heard. At the July 3 meeting, public commenters, including a Johnson & Johnson spokesperson and a Maryland-based pediatric rheumatologist, spoke out in frustration.

“I have come to realize over the last month or so that it honestly doesn’t really matter what I say, patients say, or other organizations say, if we are receiving funding from pharmaceutical companies,” said Tiffany Westrich-Robertson, the CEO of the International Foundation for Autoimmune and Autoinflammatory Arthritis.

Westrich-Robertson and others argued that insurers would maintain the same out-of-pocket costs for the drugs and pocket the savings. Board members were receptive to that concern, but they also expressed optimism that they could figure out how to hold insurers accountable.

“We don’t know for certain what the effects of setting an upper payment limit would be,” board member Gail Mizner testified. “Hearing from insurers is really going to be a key part of the upper payment limit process.”

Under the state law that created the board, insurers will be required to submit an annual report documenting how savings from price caps were passed on to consumers. Advocates argue that the board is working to ensure that guardrails are in place to protect consumers from profiteering.

“The board is approaching this really cautiously and carefully,” Telang told KUNC.

In the coming months, the board will research the cost of manufacturing Stelara and Cosentyx to calibrate its eventual price cap. Though the July 3 meeting set the motion in process, the board could still decide to end its deliberations at any time and forgo a payment limit.

In its next meeting, scheduled for Friday, July 19 at 10 a.m., the board will meet with the Prescription Drug Affordability Advisory Council, which includes representatives from various stakeholder groups including drug companies, pharmacists and labor unions. The meeting is open to the public, and you can register to attend at this link.

This story was updated at 10:32pm on July 23, 2024 to reflect that Tiffany Westrich-Robertson’s appeared at the July 3 meeting of the Prescription Drug Affordability Board as a representative of the International Foundation for Autoimmune and Autoinflammatory Arthritis.

Gabe Allen, KUNC

The post Colorado moves forward with price caps for unaffordable prescriptions despite possible litigation appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

(Via AP Storyshare)

The rates Medicare pays hospitals are carefully calculated to cover the actual cost of care in an efficient health care facility. But Anthem, Cigna, United and other commercial health insurers in Colorado are paying significantly more than Medicare, according to a new Center for Improving Value in Health Care report.

Kristin Paulson, president and CEO of the Center for Improving Value in Health Care, said it would make sense for hospitals to charge commercial insurers a little more than Medicare, to help expand services and shore up hospital bottom lines.

“But the data that we’ve just released demonstrates that hospitals are getting four, five, or sometimes even six times what Medicare pays. And that’s well beyond what we’d expect simply to strengthen a business’ bottom line or expand care,” she explained.

Using a new health care payment comparison tool, the Center found that while commercial insurers are paying more, overall payments compared to Medicare dropped by 4% between 2019 and 2022 across all facility types statewide. Paulson noted programs — including the new Colorado Option plans, which are held to a percentage of Medicare rates — can help keep costs down.

Commercial plans operating through ‘ConnectForHealthCO.com’ must spend 80% of consumer premium dollars on patient care, only 20% can go to administration costs and profits. But there are no incentives to challenge high prices. Paulson noted if insurers collect $1 million in premiums, they can only take in $200,000 in profits. If costs double, insurers can increase premiums, and profits.

“If they are covering the same people for the same services, they would have to charge $2 million in premiums, and they would be able to keep up to $400,000,” she continued. “So, the payers make money when prices go up as well.”

Paulson said Coloradans can do their part to lower health costs by using the Center’s Shop for Care tool at ‘civhc.org/shop-for-care,’ which compares procedure prices at different facilities.

“The more we’re paying for health care out of our own pocket, and through our health insurance companies, the more premiums will continue to rise. So as consumers, we need to be aware that these prices differences exist, and we need to look for opportunities to get lower-cost high-quality care,” she said.

Eric Galatas, Public News Service

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Eating ALL the Greens!

Spring has sprung and we are well into the time here on the Front Range when plants are sprouting like… well… dandelions in June. All the farm Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program baskets, the grocery stores, Farmer’s Markets, and home gardens are rife with tiny hakurei turnips, spring onions, and lots and lots of greens. 

Tender lettuces of all kinds, frondy carrot tops, smooth oval spinach leaves, colorful chard, baby not-yet-tough collards, pea shoots, lightly peppery arugula, bright green kale, mild beet and turnip greens, even horseradish leaf and fennel sprouts are having their moment right now and how lucky we are for it! Leafy greens are touted as the healthy diet panacea: rich in vitamins and minerals, high in fiber, and full of micronutrients! But wait, there’s more! Eating them reduces your risk of heart attack, obesity, dementia, and high blood pressure! You might think that the leafy green industry is hand-in-glove with the nutrition scientists, given how oft-touted the benefits of a diet rich in these greens are. Anemic? Eat greens. Low energy? Eat greens. Constipated? Bored? Lonely? Eat greens!

Fresh greens always make great salads, but there are also so many other ideas below!

Almost all garden-fresh greens, especially when they are young and tender, are delicious eaten raw in salads. As much as a good mixed green salad is now and again, not all salads must be composed entirely or even mostly of greens. Shredded carrots tossed with arugula, toasted pine nuts, and a simple vinaigrette make for a sweet, tangy, spicy, crunchy, absolutely delicious side dish.

Add a little bleu cheese or some crispy bacon bits and serve with fresh bread and you’ve got a perfect spring dinner. Or try mixing together cooled cooked quinoa, black beans, corn, and baby spinach dressed in a lime juice dressing. Add shredded or chopped greens to your tuna or egg salad. Make a fresh green dressing by blending greens with oil, vinegar, garlic, salt and pepper, and whatever flavors you like. Put fresh greens in your homemade hummus. Potato salad with finely sliced greens is wonderful.

All these lovely fresh greens are also wonderful cooked. Throw a handful into stir-fries, omelets, or soups. Make pesto or pistou then eat on pretty much anything (baked potato? yes! pasta? of course! sandwiches? obviously!) or spread on top of fish, chicken, or tofu and bake or grill. Lightly steam pea pods and pea shoots and serve tossed in sesame oil and a dash of rice vinegar. Make Indian saag or add extra greens to your chimichurri.

Throw them on pizza, stuff them into enchiladas, cook them with rice, bake them into lasagne, or saute them with fresh garlic – you can’t really go wrong. Except for kale milkshakes. Yes, there is such a thing. No, I do not like them. No, I do not recommend them. I love ice cream. I love kale. I do not love them blended together and drunk through a straw. You can even take a page from Dr. Seuss and make green eggs and ham — add a couple of handfuls of the green of your choice to your scrambled eggs for fun. Have you ever had Romaine lettuce soup? It’s delicious. And you have not fully lived until you have eaten Ethiopian collard greens and potatoes.

Here is one of my favorite ways to use beet greens; you can use either tender baby greens plucked straight from your garden or bigger greens twisted off the tops of large beets, either works here. You can put this on top of salmon before baking, use as a dressing for pasta salad, mix into plain yogurt, dip fresh bread into it, top a hearty vegetable soup with a heaping spoonful, the possibilities are many. I would be absolutely delighted to hear what you do with this if you make it – please let me know.

Beet Green and Pumpkin Seed Pesto

• 2 cups beet greens, well washed
• ½ cup raw peeled pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
• ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1-2 cloves fresh garlic, to taste
• salt and pepper, to taste 

Toast the pumpkin seeds in a dry pan over medium heat, tossing frequently until they are lightly browned. Remove from heat and let cool. Into a food processor place the greens, the toasted pumpkin seeds, the oil, 1 clove of garlic, a pinch of salt, and a few grinds of pepper then puree. Taste the pesto, adjust with garlic, salt and pepper as needed. This can keep in an airtight jar in your fridge for at least a week or you can freeze it for several months.

BONUS! Reader submitted recipe we just had to share.

We received a handwritten letter from a loyal reader, Nelda. She included a recipe for dumplings, which I am happy to pass on as written. Please let me know if you try it. Thank you, Nelda!

Nelda’s Danish Dumplings

• 4 Tbs butter
• ½ cup boiling water
• 1 tsp salt
• ? cup flour
• 2 eggs

Bring water and butter to a boil. Add flour all at once, stirring constantly. Cook until moisture leaves sides of pan. When cool, add salt and eggs, one at a time. Beat until smooth. Drop by teaspoon into boiling liquid. Cook about 4 minutes. DO NOT COVER PAN as dumplings are cooking.

I will be here again next month, to talk food and answer questions. Please be part of the dialogue by submitting your questions or comments to jessicahersh1@gmail.com

The post Culinaria – Greens appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

By John Ingold, The Colorado Sun. (Via AP Storyshare)

Colorado lawmakers are considering a bill that would prevent hospitals from publicly concealing their involvement in lawsuits against patients, following a joint Colorado Sun/9News investigation into the practice.

The bill, House Bill 1380, would apply to all debt collection lawsuits broadly, not just those over medical debt. It would require that the owner of a debt be listed among the plaintiffs in any lawsuit seeking to collect on the debt.

The bill passed its first committee hearing late Wednesday. Supporters say they hope the bill will make it easier for people to understand who is suing them and why in debt collection cases.

“When a consumer doesn’t recognize the name, they often ignore the action, and that can make things worse for them,” said state Rep. Javier Mabrey, D-Denver, one of the bill’s lead sponsors.

The proposal addresses an issue highlighted in The Sun and 9News’ investigation.

The investigation, which was done in conjunction with the Colorado News Collaborative and KFF Health News, found that UCHealth, the state’s largest health care provider, has sued thousands of patients per year over what it claimed were unpaid bills. But UCHealth’s involvement in the lawsuits was invisible to the public because the lawsuits were filed in the names of debt collection companies working for the health care providers.

It is common practice for hospitals and other medical providers to work with debt collection companies to pursue patients for money. But providers like UCHealth go a step further and “assign” the debt to the debt collector without relinquishing ownership of the debt.

Based on that, the debt collection companies put their own names on lawsuits against patients, arguing that they are the proper plaintiff even though the money isn’t owed to them.

Since the publication of the investigation, The Sun and 9News have learned of multiple other hospitals and medical groups in Colorado that engage in the same practice.

The exterior of the University of Colorado Hospital on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, photographed on Oct. 18, 2019. The hospital is the flagship of the UCHealth system. (John Ingold, The Colorado Sun)

UCHealth officials told The Sun and 9News that the health system sued more than 15,000 patients between 2019 and 2023 over debts. Since 2000, almost none of the cases has listed UCHealth as a plaintiff. Jacki Cooper Melmed, UCHealth’s chief legal officer, said it makes more sense to use the debt collectors’ names on the lawsuits because they are the ones making decisions about the lawsuits.

“We are not hiding anything,” she said. “There is no mystery about what’s going on here.”

But consumer-advocacy groups say the system has the effect of concealing UCHealth’s involvement in the lawsuits, making it harder to track the enormous amount of litigation coming from the nonprofit hospital system.

“This is not how responsible parties should act,” Carly Weisenberg, the lead health care organizer at the Center for Health Progress, testified Wednesday before the state House Judiciary Committee. “Deceiving people who owe money should never be a strategy to hide affiliation.”

Weisenberg’s organization currently has a campaign pressuring UCHealth to stop suing patients.

Multiple patients sued over UCHealth debts told The Sun and 9News that the practice of suing under the debt collectors’ name caused them confusion as they struggled to understand who was suing them and what the bill was for.

The only note of the health system’s involvement in the cases comes in brief attachments to the lawsuit complaints that are sealed from public view. Even then, the attachments provide the barest of information and are not on any kind of official form or letterhead, leading some patients to question whether the lawsuits were a scam.

At Wednesday’s committee hearing, Mabrey, the sponsor, said this kind of confusion is common in cases where people are sued by entities who don’t actually own the debt they are suing over.

“At a certain point it feels like, ‘What part of this is real?'” he said.

That skepticism could cause people not to respond to the lawsuits, leading to default judgments and wage-garnishment orders being entered against them.

When the bill was introduced, it required the plaintiffs in a debt-collection lawsuit to own 100% of the debt over which they were suing. After intense negotiation with representatives of the debt-collection industry, though, Mabrey moved Wednesday to drop that requirement.

The version that passed the committee now says collection companies assigned the debt can be listed as plaintiffs so long as the underlying owner of the debt is also listed as a plaintiff.

That change tempered much of the opposition to the bill, with prominent players in the debt-collection lobby moving to more neutral positions.

“What we have at the end of the day may serve our needs and Colorado consumers, as well,” Alan Greenberg, an attorney who specializes in debt collection cases, told the committee Wednesday.

The bill, which is supported by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, also contains two other significant provisions related to debt collection.

One prohibits collection agencies from seeking warrants for the arrest of people being sued over debts, though it does not forbid judges from issuing warrants if a defendant is nonresponsive to court orders. The second creates new regulations for so-called debt management services providers — companies that work with people to consolidate and pay off debts.

The House Judiciary Committee approved the bill on a 7-4 vote, with Democratic Rep. Marc Snyder of Manitou Springs voting no alongside the committee’s three Republicans. The bill next goes to the full House, and it also must still pass in the state Senate before the legislative session ends on May 8.

The post Hospitals suing patients over unpaid bills would have to put their names on the lawsuits under new Colorado bill appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

The pros and cons of incorporating faith into treatment facilities

Recovery is not easy. It often takes more than willpower alone. Substance Use Disorder (SUD) treatment is most successful when rehabilitation programs are utilized. However, there are a number of barriers that stand between a person struggling with addiction and recovery.

“The behavior and mental health world [are[ behind in their ability to make access easy. If you have a medical emergency, you would know exactly where to go; often, the process for mental health can feel cumbersome for someone struggling,” said Ronnie Vasquez, the Acute Care Director at Mental Health Partners of Colorado. Vasquez explained that the stigmatization of treatment for addiction can be a significant barrier to a person taking the first steps to finding support.

Historically, faith-based treatment centers held a “free-will” opinion around substance use, believing that there was a personal choice to use. More recently, many experts have moved away from this treatment ideology, though the stigma that addiction is a personal choice rather than a disease still exists. Furthermore, private, faith-based centers may not adhere to the more recent evidence-based practices that have proven most effective in helping those struggling with addiction. Some still abide by an abstinence-only approach to addiction treatment.

While there are some less-than-ideal factors in faith-based recovery, there are also major financial and community-based benefits, bringing to question the role of spirituality and religion in recovery.

Inside the Mental Health Partners Crisis Center

Substance use in Boulder County

The Boulder County County Coroner’s office reported that of the 403 deaths certified in 2022. 194 of those individuals had banned substances in their system at the time of death, with at least 73 deaths attributed directly to illegal drug use.. Dr. Nadia Haddad, the medical director at Mental Health Partners of Colorado, and board-certified psychiatrist and addiction specialist, spoke about the recent trends in Boulder County.

“When I started working here in 2019, opiate use was the most common, with people mostly abusing pharmaceutical drugs,” said Haddad. “About six months in, it moved more to fentanyl use. Now, it is almost exclusively fentanyl, which is very, very difficult to treat.” Haddad explained that most abused non-pharmaceutical drugs are contaminated with fentanyl at varying amounts, making them less predictable and more lethal, leading to a higher risk of an overdose.

Unfortunately, overdoses are also more likely to occur after a person has maintained a level of sobriety. In a study published by the National Library of Medicine, around 47% of individuals have a reduced tolerance to substances after twenty-eight days of sobriety, and 27% completely lose their tolerance in that time. The danger arises during relapse. Often a person will use a substance in the same manner as they did before detox, despite the physiological changes that occurred, leading to an unintended overdose.

New evidence-based practices look to reduce the risk of relapse and overdose by mitigating the previous beliefs of “abstinence only” and incorporating harm-reduction practices and medication-assisted treatment.

The Road to Recovery

Treatment can look different based on need, insurance, and availability. A detox center will mostly focus on getting an individual through their withdrawal symptoms. A residential program will provide around-the-clock care and treatment in a (usually) closed facility. Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOP) are a step down from residential, providing a safe place for clients to spend the day, participating in groups and medical care, with the freedom to go home at the end of the day. A sober living house is an overnight group living situation that bans illicit substance use but allows clients to return to life, and attend work, school, or other daily activities.

As a person moves through the levels of treatment, they might connect with a recovery group and/or therapist. Often, SUD is a co-occurring diagnosis, meaning that the individual is also dealing with a mental health disorder. Treating the whole person can help prevent relapse and examine the root cause of substance use. A recovery group can help people feel less isolated and develop a sense of accountability and connection among their peers.

Evidence-Based Practices

For SUD treatment, the most up-to-date practices include the medical and mental health treatment required to help a person struggling with addiction stay safe from overdose or lasting repercussions. “There has been a movement away from looking at addiction as if it were a criminal behavior to viewing it as an illness, and more recently, as a chronic illness,” said Dr. Brad Conner, the director of the Masters of Addiction Counseling program at Colorado State University. Conner goes on to explain the importance of not looking at relapse as a fault but rather as a piece of the recovery process, taking away the negative stigmatization of one-directional recovery. He explains that current evidence-based practices have moved away from a twenty-eight-day abstinence model and have started to view treatment as a lifelong process.

The risks of going “Cold Turkey”

Cutting off substance use immediately, without intervention, is referred to as going “cold turkey.” While it might be an effective way to remove a person from a triggering environment, it comes with risks that can prove uncomfortable at best, and deadly at worst. Dr. Haddad warned, “Detoxing from benzos [benzodiazepines] can cause seizures, and alcohol has the risk of Delirium Tremens, which there can be great support around in a detox or treatment center.” A sudden halt in alcohol use causes Delirium Tremens (DTs.) Because alcohol is a depressant, the sudden depletion in the system causes the brain and nervous system to get overstimulated, causing a spike in blood pressure, extreme excitability, and seizures

While not all substances are deadly during withdrawal, many have unpleasant symptoms that can make the person in recovery extremely sick. “It is horribly uncomfortable, and it can be extremely tempting to use during that time.” Haddad continues explaining that even when the symptoms of withdrawal are gone, craving can remain, putting the individual at risk of relapse and accidental overdose.

Medication Assisted Treatment

Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) is an effective tool to help a person get through detoxification and the subsequent withdrawals. MAT uses FDA-approved drugs to help a person safely withdraw from a substance, as well as prevent future cravings with continued medicated use. “There is data showing a 90% relapse rate for heroin without the use of any MAT,” said Haddad, “it is really hard to do alone.”

For Opiate Use Disorder (OUD) there are three approved medications: Methadone and Buprenorphine which prevent withdrawal and minimize cravings, and Naltrexone, which blocks the effects of opiates. Both Buprenorphine and Naltrexone can be prescribed and taken once the individual returns home, while Methadone is administered in clinics. Naltrexone is also used in treating Alcohol Use Disorder, often as an aid in helping a person begin to limit use. Acamprosate and Disulfiram are both used for individuals who have already stopped drinking and need to lessen their cravings.

While MAT has a high success rate, Dr. Conner warns, “There can be more doctor visits, and some of the medications have unpleasant side effects.” For this reason, it is helpful to maintain contact with a care team while undergoing MAT.

Harm-Reduction Practices

The general principle of Harm-Reduction is to minimize the impact of illicit substances, whether it is through abstinence, safer use practices, or management of use. This philosophy accepts that substance use and addiction are a part of the world, and supporting a person who is using is more effective than condemning the behavior.

MAT falls under the umbrella of Harm-Reduction, but the practice also expands to preventing overdose and providing safe spaces and tools for individuals who are not ready to undergo treatment.

Where Does Faith Come in?

In speaking about faith-based practices, it is essential to remember that faith and spirituality can look vastly different depending on the individual and the culture. For that reason, lumping all faith-based treatment centers together is impossible. The historically popular Twelve-Step Programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) list their second step as acknowledging a higher power, though there is no dictation or indication of what that higher power has to be.

Dr. Brian Grim is the CEO and founder of the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation, as well as a former researcher for the PEW Research Center, and author of the article “Belief, Behavior, and Belonging: How Faith is Indispensable in Preventing and Recovering from Substance Abuse” which looked at the multifaceted role faith can play in recovery. He explained, “There is a spectrum of faith-based centers. Somewhere faith is front and forefront, and somewhere it is more in the background. The premise of any faith-based recovery is that they need a higher power to get out of addiction. Some will make that higher power nebulous, but often the intention is a god-like figure”

The Bad

Late Adapting of Evidence-Based Practices

Some Faith-Based practitioners are not always adaptors of the Harm-Reduction model, with some going so far as to disallow any medication at all. “I have seen clients who have been sent to private facilities that require they are removed from even their mood-stabilizing medication,” says Haddad, adding that the practice is highly harmful to the safety of the client.

While not using Harm-Reduction techniques can be up to the client, the problem arises when a treatment center needs to state that MAT is not provided clearly. Having the advocacy of a case manager or informed family member can be extremely beneficial when finding a treatment program.

Stigmatization

Unfortunately, for many, religious trauma can exist with those who are also dealing with SUD. The past stigmatization of substance use and the potential evangelizing in faith-based treatment can be enough to deter an individual from seeking treatment. Dr Grim explains, “Religion often gets a bad wrap in the news cycle, but it can cut both ways. People can be hurt when the teachings are abused.”

However, sometimes, the most immediate treatment could be a private, faith-based institution. In those cases, an individual might have to make a hard decision: wait for treatment or negate their principles. Dr. Conner states, “For better or worse, many faith-based [programs] will be lower cost and easier to get into. In those instances, a person may not feel connected immediately.” In these situations, Conner recommends the individual figure out what works for them in treatment and avoid getting bogged down in the belief system.

The Good

Volunteers and Availability

A benefit of faith-based SUD treatment is that they are privately funded through donations or private grants, and often use the work of volunteers for a higher patient-to-caregiver ratio. Some studies suggest that faith-based volunteer work saves the United States Government around $316 Million annually.

Furthermore, there are executive orders to prevent the government from funding faith-based groups, which prevents a collision of church and state, or mandated faith-based recovery for those sentenced to treatment from the court.

Forming Connections and Community

Most importantly, there is a lot of research indicating that connection and groups are paramount in treatment and lasting recovery. Finding a connection and belonging can help an individual stay accountable and feel purpose. While faith-based groups are far and away not the only option, they are a common way for people in recovery to join an established community.

Faith-based recovery, at it’s core, is not necessarily a negative model. However, like any institution, improper policies can have detrimental impacts on the individual. For that reason, it is important to know what to look for when seeking treatment.

When Seeking Treatment

• Ask for help. Engaging with trusted friends or family who are willing to help advocate is extremely helpful in navigating the system. If there are no available resources, try calling the SAMHSA helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357)
• Get connected with a care team. Starting with community-based organizations, such as Mental Health Partners of Colorado or reaching out to primary care physicians for referrals can be a great start.
• Remember that it is a process, and there is no perfect way to recover.

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The post The Role of Spirituality in Substance Use Disorder Treatment appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Some 911 calls will now result in a mental health response rather than a police presence

The City of Boulder launched in December an alternative response pilot program, Community Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE), to respond to dispatcher-triaged 911 and non-emergency line calls that do not require a police response.

The CARE pilot program is part of the city’s effort to create an alternative to police response for 911 calls that are not criminal in nature, do not present safety concerns, and may be more appropriately addressed by health care and behavioral health professionals. The CARE team consists of a behavioral health clinician, a paramedic, and includes intensive case management. This program aims to better assist community members with complex needs.

“The City of Boulder takes pride in its emergency medical services for the community,” said Michael Calderazzo, Fire Chief. “Boulder Fire-Rescue additionally appreciates the great value of partnering with Housing and Human Services in providing advanced level care and preventative medical assistance to those here in need.”

Wendy Schwartz, Human Services Policy Manager, said CARE is patterned after the STAR program in Denver.

STAR is a partnership between the WellPower, Denver Health, Denver Police Department, Denver Department of Public Health and Environment as well as community stakeholders like Caring4Denver and more.

Photo by Jonnica Hille, via Unsplash

STAR provides person-centric mobile crisis response to community members who are experiencing problems related to mental health, depression, poverty, homelessness, and/or substance use issues. Before the STAR program began, Denver’s 911 system was limited to addressing 911 calls through traditional ways, like sending police. Calls for health and safety issues were routed one of two ways; either they went through the police or the health/hospital system. STAR created a third option.

When someone calls 911 for something like a mental health crisis, substance use issue or even something like homelessness or poverty, their call can now be routed to STAR. STAR sends a behavioral health professional and a paramedic to the person in distress.

“Our city council was very interested in this type of a program, and we put together a team to look at planning this in Boulder and went through a process, did some ride-along with STAR, did research on other programs, did some analysis of what was going on here in Boulder. That’s how we put together the program here in Boulder in a cross-departmental partnership,” Schwartz said.

During the first phase of the pilot program, the CARE team is only available Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Schwartz said in the program’s early months city leadership will continue to assess the success of the program and how it is meeting the needs of the community. As staffing increases and the program makes improvements based on lessons learned during the pilot period, CARE will expand its operating hours.

Boulder is the first community in Boulder County to implement this kind of alternative response program.

Schwartz said city staff will work with a professional evaluator to review success metrics of the CARE pilot program and make improvements as the program evolves.  

“We have hired an independent external evaluator to really follow along with us this first year in evaluating and looking at the data, looking at what’s happening,” she said. “After the first year of the program, then the evaluator would be working on a report to assess the information, and that report will certainly be made public. We do check-ins on a monthly basis on how the program’s going as well.”

CARE responds to calls involving concerns about a person’s wellbeing. Calls may involve concerns about anxiety, depression, thoughts or statements about suicide, substance use, minor medical issues, or a person who is experiencing a decline and not receiving appropriate care. CARE does not respond to calls with a report of criminal activity, threats of violence, physical disturbance, weapons, injuries, or major medical need.

“Our goal is that every community member gets the response that best meets their needs at the moment,” Schwartz said. “With licensed behavioral health clinicians and paramedics evaluating appropriate cases in the field, we have one more tool to help people connect with the right services at the right time.”  

Through the CARE pilot program, the city aims to:

• Help people feel supported and able to manage complex challenges while staying in the community.
• Increase positive health impacts for community members served by CARE and reduce future emergency services calls for those individuals through connection to ongoing community services.
• Better use police and fire-rescue resources by diverting calls that could be more effectively served by an alternative response.
• Achieve cost savings from reduced emergency services by reducing unnecessary ambulance rides.

The CARE team complements the Crisis Intervention Response Team (CIRT), which responds to higher acuity calls than CARE. Through CIRT, clinicians respond with police on calls involving a behavioral health crisis. Other outreach and alternative response groups in the city include the Homeless Outreach Team, Urban Park Rangers, Downtown Ambassadors and Nurse Navigator Program.

CARE now offers an additional approach to helping ensure community members’ diverse needs are met with a compassionate and effective response with the CIRT team, otherwise known as the CIR team. And that’s licensed behavioral health clinicians that respond with police to situations that seem like they might have a behavioral health component.

“There’s a dispatch protocol and we modeled this, we used information from Denver and STAR program to see how they were doing this where they really look at the information being provided in the call and do an assessment of which type of response might be most appropriate,” Schwartz said. “If it is something that really seems like it has roots in a behavioral health or low-level health issue and there’s no indications about violence, weapons, et cetera, then that would be a candidate for a CARE response.”

Schwartz said the Care clinicians are HHS employees and the paramedics are from the Boulder Fire Department.

“We also have case managers as part of the program. After the initial crisis is deescalated, then case managers who are HHS employees can work with those individuals to help them connect with ongoing community services,” she said. 

Schwartz said the CARE program is paid for through allocated city funds.

“The funding is part of the city’s budget. It’s city funding that’s been allocated to the departments of Housing and Human Services and the fire department to support the program,” she said.

Schwartz said Boulder hasn’t been immune to economic, social, and crime concerns among residents.

“In Boulder is what people have been experiencing across the country, which is really increased concerns about behavioral health and wellness after the community experienced since the pandemic here in Boulder,” she said. “We had the King Soopers shooting, really a lot of stress for the community.”

Schwartz said she hopes the CARE program brings people together to help those in need.

“I think that what we would hope to see is that people are getting connected to community care, different resources that exist for ongoing care in the community so that whatever brought them to that crisis point, that situation can be addressed so that they don’t have to continually be in crisis,” she said.

For more information about the CARE program visit https://bouldercolorado.gov/services/community-assistance-response-and-engagement

Colorado Crisis Services and Mental Health Partners clinicians and support specialists are available 24/7:

• Call: 1-844-493-8255 or 988
• Text: TALK to 38255
• Visit: 3180 Airport Road in Boulder

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The post Boulder Pilots Alternative Response Program to Emergency Calls appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Q&A With Author Lisa Fierer about finding healing through yoga and writing

In “Thirst,” author Lisa Fierer writes about living in an abusive household, and piecing herself back together after her father murdered her mother. We sat down with Fierer to talk about her healing process, future ideas, and if forgiveness is attainable in a situation like hers.

Yellow Scene: Does it get easier to talk about your past? 

Lisa Fierer: I work full time as a yoga teacher, and I only bring that up because with a book out in the world it invites people to bring up traumatic topics at unexpected times. So, I’d say yes and no. 

YS: At one point you wrote that you wanted to lock your past away. Why tell your story now?

LF: The truth is that it wouldn’t let me go. And honestly the seed was planted when I was a little kid. I always had my nose in a book. I don’t think I was conscious of it. But I was always looking to relate and to read about a character that had a life like mine.

YS: Do you have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? 

LF: Yeah. I know that I do. I’ve never technically been diagnosed with it. When my mom was murdered, we just weren’t sent to therapy. It’s the early 80s. And [therapy] was so taboo… So, yeah, I know that I live with it. I know that I navigate it. I know that’s a lot of what my addiction was trying to medicate. 

LS: How long have you been sober?

LF: Twenty-eight years.

YS: How do your siblings feel about you telling your story?

LF: I was really open from the get go. Every relationship is different, especially between siblings…One of the greatest pieces of advice I got in my writing community is to write first and edit later. And that has applied in everything but especially about family.

YS: What drew you to your first Sun Dance? 

LF: I would say the same thing drew me to that as to writing this book – this deep sense of knowing that is beyond debate. In yoga that might be called dharma or life purpose.

YS: What does forgiveness mean to you?

LF: It means a space beyond the hurt that doesn’t dismiss the hurt and the harm that occurred. That’s why I think it’s such a fascinating topic. I don’t think there’s one prescription that fits every situation. Every situation is so unique that it’s changed for me throughout my own relationship with my dad, for example. I never wanted to forgive him ever because it was the only power I had in an otherwise completely powerless situation. It wasn’t until I realized I was imprisoning myself with my own rage and resentment that I began to open up to something different. 

YS: Have you forgiven your dad?

LF: Yeah, definitely. But it’s not a one and done thing. I mean it is. I know that I’ve forgiven him because even though he’s gone, when I think of him now, it’s in a completely neutral and often positive way, which was never the case. 

I think what’s important about my story is the fact that I write about being such an asshole. And often, I look back and that gets lost. Seeing my father in me helped me be willing to excavate some of that and to empower myself. 

YS: At one point you mention that a book was itching to come out of you. Do you think that itch correlated with some of the healing you were doing through yoga?

LF: Definitely. I had tried to dampen down and forget about that experience with alcohol and addiction. And this is what was beneath all of that. 

YS: Is your reckoning with the past over?

LF: Is it ever? I don’t know. I think there are kind of layers. I don’t think the piece that I feel about it will just dissolve. But I’ve never been married. I certainly wrote about a pretty intimate relationship. When I encounter those and perhaps a partner’s relationship with their dad that there may be new or other layers. I don’t feel afraid of it though. I think that’s the difference.

YS: Do you think you have other books in your future?

LF: I hope so. I hope they’re really light. There’s maybe a children’s book or a prescriptive nonfiction [in my future]. Maybe I’ll write about what happened behind the scenes of thirst. But honestly, I’m so over that story.

The post Decades after her mother was murdered by her father, author Lisa Fierer shares her story appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

By Leigh Paterson, KUNC (Via AP Storyshare)

In communities across Northern Colorado, people are struggling with their mental health while also struggling to get the care they need.

The problem is widespread. Around a quarter of residents reported having poor mental health in the most recent Colorado Health Access Survey. Out of the 1 in 6 Coloradans who were unable to get needed care, nearly half said they had a hard time getting an appointment, while nearly 60% were concerned about cost.

Fort Collins resident Kristin Vera has lived these statistics while trying to get her teenage daughter help over the past several years.

“Her mood was so extraordinarily low. And of course, I was worried about self-harm, suicide and also, it’s just hard to see your kid being miserable,” Vera told KUNC earlier this year.

During the pandemic, Vera had trouble finding a therapist who accepted insurance, had openings, and who would be a good fit for her daughter who was depressed and questioning her gender identity.

“I just remember the anxiety of being in that space of feeling like someone has got to help us. But who? Where are they?” Vera said.

Over the past few months, we have been reporting on the barriers residents face in getting help, despite laws in place to ensure insurance coverage. Here’s what you need to know about mental health parity laws.

What is mental health parity?

Federal and state parity laws require insurance companies to cover behavioral health services such as therapy in the same way that they cover physical health services such as doctor’s appointments. Parity laws prohibit insurance carriers from being more restrictive based on measures like copays and the number of covered appointments.

With some exceptions, mental health services are a covered benefit for most Coloradans with insurance. Still, residents regularly have trouble getting care.

“It can be really, honestly be like climbing Everest twice without oxygen to go from the moment of realizing that you need help and then within seven calendar days walking in or signing on to your first therapy session using your insurance,” said Cara Cheevers, the head of behavioral health at Colorado’s Division of Insurance, in reference to getting care within a week, as required by regulation.

If parity laws exist, why is getting help so hard?

Several reasons. One is a widespread problem with inaccurate provider directories known as “ghost networks”. This is when an insured person pulls up a list of in-network therapists but then is unable to connect with them over phone or email.

“You might find out that person is no longer in-network,” Cheevers said. “It may be that they’re not even in your state. It may be that they’re not even real. It might be that you might have the same person duplicated five or 10 times, and they’re not taking new patients.”

Colorado regulation does require insurance companies to regularly update their directories. The state’s Division of Insurance is currently working to determine the scope of ghost networks here.

Plus, in many rural communities, Colorado has a true shortage of therapists, counselors, psychologists and other behavioral health providers. But perhaps the even bigger issue is the lack of providers who take insurance. In some cases, insurance reimbursement rates are too low. For many, the process of getting in-network, called credentialing, takes too long — sometimes up to four months.

“It’s too hard to figure out how to get in-network. There are challenges with the administrative burden of taking commercial insurance. Some providers will say it’s not worth the extra lift to do so,” Cheevers said.

For now, residents who can afford to pay out-of-pocket do, while others try to figure out a way to get in-network care or go without help entirely.

Over the summer, the Division of Insurance asked companies to speed up and simplify the process. There is also an effort to get more pre-licensed providers in the mix and covered by insurance to ease the workforce shortage.

Posters for I Matter, the state’s free student therapy program hang in Fort Collins High School. The initiative was launched in 2021, in response to a significant increase in youth mental health needs in Colorado. (Leigh Paterson/KUNC)

How does Colorado enforce its parity laws?

In 2019, lawmakers here passed a bill that expanded parity and gave the Division of Insurance more power. That’s when Cara Cheevers’ job was created. Her department now has three employees.

The Division of Insurance enforces parity proactively through actions such as yearly reviews of co-pays and pharmacy benefits. They issue regulations and fines. But enforcement without sufficient consumer complaints can be tricky; last year, the division only received 48 complaints related to behavioral health.

“It takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of time and a lot of times policy change is not sexy either, right? Like to say, ‘Oh we amended this regulation and now we’re collecting data on reimbursement rates’ and to someone experiencing a crisis or someone who’s struggling to get out of bed, that doesn’t land,” Cheevers said. “That is, I think, the inherent just push and pull of systems work and systems change.”

Are Coloradans aware that because of parity laws, mental heath services should be covered?

Struggling to find care is a common experience but many people are unaware of their consumer rights. According to the most recent Colorado Health Access Survey, 70% of people who went without needed care said they did not think insurance would cover it.

If you are unable to get covered treatment within the specified timeframe, your insurance company should approve that treatment with an out-of-network provider, in writing.

Some help is out there. For insurance questions and to file a complaint, the Division of Insurance has a consumer services team that is reachable over the phone or email.

Colorado also has an independent behavioral health ombudsman who residents can contact for help navigating the system.

KUNC is part of the Mental Health Parity Collaborative, a group of newsrooms that are covering stories on mental health care access and inequities in the U.S.. The partners on this project include The Carter Center, The Center for Public Integrity, and newsrooms in select states across the country.

The post From long wait lists to high costs, finding a therapist in Colorado is harder than it should be appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Rocky Mountain PBS (Via AP Storyshare)

By: Elle Naef, Peter Vo

Photo from previous Dazzle show

DENVER — On a recent Thursday night at Dazzle, guests filled the chairs while servers skillfully weaved through aisles between songs, skirting their way around composer Chie Imaizumi who was conducting her “Little Big Band” from the floor in front of the stage, just feet from the audience.

“Gift of Jazz Presents: Chie Imaizumi Little Big Band feat. Randy Brecker and Greg Gisbert,” was part of an exclusive two-night concert series at Dazzle Denver’s new location in the Denver Performing Arts Complex.

The series was a collaboration between jazz artists who have experienced challenges with mental wellness. The artists aimed to bring the conversation of mental wellness to center stage, creating a sense of unity and belonging for all involved — including the audience.

A trumpet solo stunned the audience, and Imaizumi grinned and clapped along with them. Her reaction was not only that of a proud composer, but one of a lifetime fan.

The trumpet player was none other than Randy Brecker of the jazz fusion band “Brecker Brothers,” as well as one of the original members of Blood, Sweat and Tears.

Imaizumi was first introduced to Brecker’s work as a preteen studying music in Japan. According to her, most of the lessons were focused on classical and Japanese pop, until a teacher encouraged her to continue her studies in Tokyo. There, her teacher took her to a concert in a giant, brightly lit concert hall booming with music. Imaizumi recalls telling her teacher, “I don’t understand what’s going on on-stage, but I want to do something like that.”

“Now I’m here having him, my star, playing my music,” Imaizumi shared, smiling at Brecker. “And that’s a dream come true.”

Full-circle moments like this one are far from a rarity at Dazzle Denver. One could even say that venue owner Donald Rossa orchestrates them.

Thanks to a vast network grown from authentic connections and a healthy dose of vulnerability, connections that develop at Dazzle go much deeper than musical collaborations. In many ways, it creates a community that supports one another in the journey of mental wellness.

The event was an excellent example of this. Rossa reached out to friend and collaborator Greg Gisbert to fulfill the first residency at Dazzle’s new location. This event was one of many Gisbert helped piece together, this time with the theme of mental wellness.

The group was curated not only for their talents, but because of their unique bond. Rossa had supported the career paths of Imaizumi and Gisbert however he could, and Gisbert had inspired Imaizumi to try a collaboration with him in a project that, with Rossa’s help, landed them on Capri records.

Even presenters The Gift of Jazz had personal investment in these relationships, as they had partnered with Dazzle to help keep Imaizumi in the U.S. to finish her studies.

Here, lifetime friendships were born. One close enough that, while in crisis, they knew they could reach out to one another to feel less alone — all thanks to music.

“I wish the world and world governments could operate more like a jazz group,” said Gisbert. “We have so much love to give and share, and we want to share it with the world.”

Rossa shared this sentiment, stating, “We all come from music and we met through music, but we share a common bond after that. And is mental health and mental wellness. That is our own personal struggles, that is struggles within our community. It’s kind of our support mechanism that we can rely upon each other, but also try to invite other people into our circle.”

The shared intent to invite audience members into the circle of healing these friends had cultivated was clear. Imaizumi composed the lineup of songs so that they align with the stages of a mental breakdown and the recovery that follows.

In the first piece of the series, entitled “Adversity,” the music begins with a dark and lonely bass solo. Imaizumi said this was meant to depict the feeling one gets when they simply can’t get the energy to wake up in the morning and face the day. From there, the songs bring the audience on a journey to hope and healing.

“It’s okay not to be okay all the time,” Imaizumi said about the piece’s message. “It’s music that everyone can relate to. I think everyone has different stories to tell, but they can relate to those dark places, traces of pain.”

The performers were just as impacted by the audience as the audience was by the music. “I saw the audience felt that as well, so it was such a beautiful moment,” Imaizumi continued. “I saw color change in the whole room.”

Needless to say, audience feedback aligned with Imaizumi’s intuition. “Some women came up to me in tears,” reflected Imaizumi, “And they’re like, ‘I didn’t know you until today, and I don’t know why, but I keep crying.’ I said, ‘I’m glad that happened for you.’”

Once again, music united once-strangers in a way that only music can. Take it from Randy Brecker himself, who concluded “Music is really the great unifier of the world.”

The post At Dazzle Denver, mental wellness is an ensemble effort appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Colorado is among several states that ensure schools have access to the opioid overdose reversal medication naloxone for free or at reduced cost. But most districts hadn’t signed up by the start of the school year for a state distribution program amid stigma around the lifesaving treatment.

By Rae Ellen Bichell and Virginia Garcia Pivik | KFF Health News (via AP Storyshare)

Last year, a student fell unconscious after walking out of a bathroom at Central High School in Pueblo, Colorado. When Jessica Foster, the school district’s lead nurse, heard the girl’s distraught friends mention drugs, she knew she had to act fast.

Emergency responders were just four minutes away. “But still four minutes — if they are completely not breathing, it’s four minutes too long,” Foster said.

Foster said she got a dose of naloxone, a medication that can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose, and gave it to the student. The girl revived.

Forty-five miles away in Colorado Springs, Mitchell High School officials didn’t have naloxone on hand when a 15-year-old student overdosed in class in December 2021 after snorting a fentanyl-laced pill in a school bathroom. That student died.

Colorado Springs’ school district has since joined Pueblo and dozens of other districts in the state in supplying middle and high schools with the lifesaving medication, often known by one of its brand names, Narcan. Since passage of a 2019 state law, Colorado has had a program that allows schools to obtain the medicine, typically in nasal spray form, for free or at a reduced cost.

Not all schools are on board with the idea, though. Though more districts have signed on since last year, only about a third of Colorado districts had enrolled in the state’s giveaway program at the start of this school year. And within the dozen counties with the highest drug overdose death rates in the state, many school districts had not signed up in the face of ongoing stigma around the need for the overdose reversal medication.

Jessica Foster, Pueblo School District 60’s nurse supervisor, holds packets of Narcan and Kloxxado, a higher dosage of naloxone the district recently started stocking. Foster has pushed to get Narcan in all the district’s schools. (Parker Seibold for KFF Health News)

The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration recommends that schools, including elementary schools, keep naloxone on hand as fatal opioid overdoses rise, particularly from the potent drug fentanyl. And 33 states have laws that expressly allow schools or school employees to carry, store, or administer naloxone, according to Jon Woodruff, managing attorney at the Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association, which tracks naloxone policies across the country.

Among those, about nine states require at least some K-12 schools to store naloxone on-site, including Illinois, whose requirement goes into effect in January. Some states, such as Maine, also require that public schools offer training to students in how to administer naloxone in nasal spray form.

Rhode Island requires all K-12 schools, both public and private, to stock naloxone. Joseph Wendelken, a spokesperson for the Rhode Island Department of Health, said in the past four years naloxone was administered nine times to people ages 10 to 18 in educational settings.

In early September, the medication also became available over the counter nationally, though the $45 price tag per two-dose package has some addiction specialists worried it will be out of reach for those who need it most.

But the medicine still isn’t as publicly widespread as automated external defibrillators or fire extinguishers. Kate King, president of the National Association of School Nurses, said reluctance to stock it in schools can stem from officials being afraid to provide a medical service or the ongoing cost of resupplying the naloxone and training people to use it. But the main hang-up she’s heard is that schools are afraid they’ll be stigmatized as a “bad school” that has a drug problem or as a school that condones bad choices.

“School districts are very careful regarding their image,” said Yunuen Cisneros, community outreach and inclusion manager at the Public Education & Business Coalition, which serves most of the state’s school districts. “Many of them don’t want to accept this program, because to accept it is to accept a drug addiction problem.”

That’s the wrong way to think about it, King said. “We really equate it to our stock albuterol for asthma attacks, our stock epinephrine for anaphylactic reactions,” she said.

Colorado health officials could not say how often naloxone had been used on school grounds in the state. So far this year, at least 15 children ages 10 to 18 have died of fentanyl overdoses but not necessarily in schools. And in 2022, 34 children in that age group died, according to the state Department of Public Health and Environment. That included 13-year-old José Hernández, who died in August 2022 from a fentanyl overdose at home just days after starting eighth grade at Aurora Hills Middle School. His grandmother found his body over the bathroom sink in the early morning.

With the arrival of this new school year, supplies of naloxone are on hand for kids in more Colorado schools. Last year, state lawmakers appropriated $19.7 million in federal aid to the Naloxone Bulk Purchase Fund, which is accessible to school districts, jails, first responders, and community service organizations, among others.

“It’s the most we’ve ever had,” said Andrés Guerrero, manager of the state health department’s overdose prevention program.

According to data provided by Colorado’s health department, 65 school districts were enrolled in the state program to receive naloxone at low or no cost at the start of the school year. Another 16 had reached out to the state for information but hadn’t finalized orders as of mid-August. The remaining 97 school districts either didn’t stock naloxone at their schools or sourced it from elsewhere.

Narcan is stocked in the same case as a defibrillator and other medical supplies at Central High School in Pueblo, Colorado. (Parker Seibold for KFF Health News)

Guerrero said the districts decide whom to train to administer the medicine. “In some cases, it’s just the school nurses. In some cases, it’s school nurses and the teachers,” he said. “And in some cases, we have the students as well.”

In Durango, the 2021 death of a high schooler galvanized students to push for the right to carry naloxone with them to school with parental permission — and to administer it if need be — without fear of punishment.

It took picketing outside a school board meeting to get permission, said Hays Stritikus, who graduated this spring from Durango High School. He’s now involved in drafting legislation that would expressly allow students across the state to carry and distribute Narcan on school grounds.

“The ultimate goal is a world where Narcan is not necessary,” he said. “But that’s just not where we live.”
Some health experts disagree that all schools should stock naloxone. Lauren Cipriano, a health economist at Western University in Canada, has studied the cost-effectiveness of naloxone in secondary schools there. While opioid poisonings have occurred on school grounds, she said, high schools tend to be really low-risk settings.
More effective strategies for combating the opioid epidemic are needle exchange sites, supervised drug consumption sites, and medication-assisted treatment that reduces cravings or mutes highs, Cipriano said. But those approaches can be expensive compared with naloxone distribution.

“When the state makes a big, free program like this, it looks like they’re doing something about the opioid epidemic,” she said. “It’s cheap and it looks like you’re doing something, and that’s, like, political gold.”
Denver Public Schools, the largest school district in Colorado, started stocking naloxone in 2022, said Jade Williamson, manager of the district’s healthy schools program.

“We know some of the students are on the forefront of these things before older generations,” Williamson said. “To know where to find it, and to access it when needed through these adults who’ve trained, whether that’s a school nurse or a school administrator, I think it brings them some sense of relief.”

The state’s seven largest districts, with more than 25,000 students each, all participate in the state program. By contrast, a KFF Health News analysis found, only 21% of districts with up to 1,200 students have signed up for it — even though many of those small districts are in areas with drug overdose death rates higher than the state average.
Some school districts figured out a path to getting naloxone outside of the state program. That includes Pueblo School District 60, where lead nurse Foster gave naloxone to a student last year.

The Pueblo school district gets naloxone at no cost from a local nonprofit called the Southern Colorado Harm Reduction Association. Foster said she tried signing up for the state program but encountered difficulties. So she decided to stick with what was already working.

Moffat County School District RE-1 in Craig, Colorado, gets its naloxone from a local addiction treatment center, according to district nurse Myranda Lyons. She said she trains school staffers on how to administer it when she teaches them CPR.

Christopher deKay, superintendent of Ignacio School District 11Jt, said its school resource officers already carry naloxone but that the district enrolled in the state program, too, so that schools could stock the medication in the nursing office in case a resource officer isn’t around.

“It’s like everything — like training for fire safety. You don’t know what’s going to happen in your school,” said deKay. “If the unthinkable happens, we want to be able to respond in the best way possible.”

This story was produced with reporting assistance from El Comercio de Colorado.

KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

The post More Colorado Schools Stock Overdose Reversal Meds, but Others Worry About Stigma appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

By Lucas Brady Woods, KUNC (Via AP Storyshare)

Snow was still on the ground last year one afternoon in late March when Hinsdale County’s only full-time paramedic, Buffy Witt, got what she thought would be a routine call about a car accident on Highway 149.

She realized she was wrong as soon as she arrived at the scene. The car pinned against a tree next to the road belonged to her 20-year-old son, Logan. He was trapped inside with a shattered femur, six broken ribs, a fractured vertebrae and a collapsed lung.

Witt immediately went into first-responder mode and focused on saving her son’s life.

“I told myself, put on your sheet of armor and just do it,” she said. “My son told me that he was getting right with dying because he knew he couldn’t get out of the car.”

Logan Witt survived after being flown to the nearest trauma center equipped to treat him, which was almost 150 miles away in Grand Junction. The experience was so traumatic that Witt stopped going on calls altogether. But there weren’t any other paramedics in Hinsdale County at the time to take her place, so less than two months later, Witt responded to the scene of another car accident. That time, the driver, a longtime friend of hers, died.

“That feeling of responsibility in a rural community, where you know the people that you respond to – it’s just such a heavy weight,” Witt said. “The burnout rate is magnified here because of the staffing issues, the personal connection and the responsibility to the community.”

On top of being a paramedic, Witt is also Hinsdale County’s director of emergency medical services. She manages the department and goes on calls for a salary of less than $60,000 per year. Like in many rural areas, any other first responders that back her up are volunteers. In fact, more than one in 10 ambulance agencies in Colorado have all-volunteer staff.

For Witt, the job is worth the challenges because she serves the community where she was born and raised. But ambulance services across Colorado, especially those in rural areas, are facing the same existential problems: a lack of funding, workforce shortages and declining volunteerism. A draft report sent to Gov. Jared Polis last week from the state’s EMS Sustainability Task Force found that many of the state’s emergency medical services are unsustainable, with some at risk of disappearing altogether.

The 20-member task force was launched last year to address the problems over a five-year period and is made up of state lawmakers and EMS professionals. Many first responders, however, including some serving on the task force, say more urgent action has to be taken.

“We can’t wait,” Lisa Ward, a professional EMT on the task force, told KUNC. “We’re already losing EMS services in Colorado. It’s not sustainable to have a volunteer and all-volunteer base when you can’t pay them, you can’t offer them health benefits, the mental and physical exhaustion that it takes to do the job wears on people.”

Fewer and fewer people are willing and able to dedicate time to volunteering as a first responder. Those that do often have to juggle other jobs to pay the bills, which means they’re only able to volunteer periodically and are at higher risk of burnout. At the same time, many small agencies don’t have the budgets to pay for full-time ambulance staff.

The problems partially stem from inconsistencies between state and local oversight of ambulance services. For example, first responders like paramedics and EMTs are currently licensed by the state while their emergency vehicles and the agencies that manage them are licensed on the county level. Colorado is the only state in the U.S. without centralized oversight of its EMS system. The state also has no uniform system in place for communicating or sharing data and information between local agencies.

“One county does one thing and another county does another thing. If you want to transfer a patient from one county to another county, you have to figure out what that looks like, how that’s done and who responds,” Ward said. “Right now it’s kind of a patchwork of county to county regulation.”

The patchwork system has resulted in varying access to emergency medical services across the state. Even the requirements for life-saving equipment on an ambulance can change from county to county because there are no statewide standards. Lawmakers passed legislation last year, Senate Bill 225, which will consolidate ambulance licensing at the state level starting in January.

Colorado ambulance services are funded in a variety of ways as well. Some are private businesses, nonprofits or function through hospital systems. Others are funded by property tax revenue alongside other local services like schools, libraries and water districts. That means local residents have to agree to higher taxes to increase funding for their emergency medical services.

Many local ambulance agencies also rely on grants from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, but the lack of statewide standards blocks access to other funding sources like federal grants.

“When you have consistency and you have standards, you make a case for reimbursement models and funding models to say, ‘Hey, look, there’s no difference in any of these agencies. It’s not a rural agency versus an urban agency.’ It creates consistency in licensing standards, education standards and equipment standards,” Ward said.

Ward also noted that ambulances in Colorado are only reimbursed if they transport a patient to a hospital. They do not get paid for calls where they only treat a person on the scene. Under state law, ambulances are considered transportation services, not medical services.

“When any one of us individuals has an emergency, we just pick up the phone in the 21st century in America and dial 911, and we anticipate that the expert on the other end of the phone is going to realize and figure out which type of emergency service to send to us within minutes,” EMS Sustainability Task Force Chairman and State Sen. Mark Baisley said. “It works pretty well for a fire because fire is considered an essential service, which is a term that has a meaning to it: that the local municipality shall provide fire response. Not so with emergency management services.”

Baisley added that there needs to be more public awareness of the issue and how Colorado EMS systems function. But he also agrees with Lisa Ward that funding needs to be the first priority, and he’s working with the task force on legislation that he plans to introduce during next year’s legislative session. He believes tourists need to cover some of those EMS costs.

“I intend to rethink the entire manner of how this is funded,” Baisley said. “Obviously, it’s always going to be through taxation. But since our tourism industry creates a lot of the cost and demands a lot of our responsiveness and appropriate care, then we will look at that.”

The population of many rural mountain communities balloons in the summer months due to tourism. Those tourists often have to use local emergency medical services, which adds even more strain to those systems.

In Hinsdale County, the population increases from about 800 people year-round to about 6,000 people over the summer months when tourists descend on the area to hike, climb, fish and hunt among the peaks of the San Juan Mountains. Buffy Witt is doing what she can on the local level to keep emergency medical services available there while holding on to hope that the state can get its EMS oversight on the right track.

“I’m just trying to keep the wheels rolling and keep the duct tape and the fingers plugged in the holes,” Witt said. “There is hope that change is on the horizon, and this personally gives me motivation to be a part of that change.”

She’s launching a local training course in partnership with neighboring counties so that volunteers don’t have to travel to become first responders. She’s also put in place a stipend program to provide some compensation to volunteers, which is funded by the San Juan Solstice 50 Mile Run, an annual Hinsdale County marathon that typically attracts about 300 runners.

The post Colorado ambulance services are on the verge of collapse, government report finds appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Eric Galatas, Public News Service (Via AP Storyshare)

A state-federal partnership is helping safety-net mental health centers in Colorado deepen the services they provide, which is improving access and outcomes for people struggling with mental illness.

Sara Reid, grants and program evaluation manager for Mental Health Partners, said because getting to appointments across town can be a significant barrier, especially for people in crisis, her team now has seven outreach workers embedded where people who need help already are.

“Places like food pantries and other types of community partners,” Reid explained. “So that the people who are there getting other types of services don’t have to then go somewhere else to try to get connected with behavioral health care.”

Colorado currently has seven Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics. Clinics getting federal funds are required to serve anyone who asks for mental health or substance abuse care, regardless of their ability to pay, place of residence, or age, including developmentally appropriate care for children and youth.

Frank Cornelia, deputy executive director of the Colorado Behavioral Health Care Council, said new national standards set by the program are key for addressing a persistent opioid addiction crisis. Certified clinics are required to get people into care quickly, provide crisis services 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and offer the full array of behavioral health services so people who need care don’t have to piece it together themselves.

“Not just mental health services, but a full complement of community-based substance-use disorder services,” Cornelia outlined. “We know that people deal with both conditions at the same time, and we need to treat both conditions at the same time. And we get better outcomes when we do that.”

Certified clinics also help patients navigate the intersections between behavioral and physical health care, social services and other programs. Reid noted stable housing is often a precursor to success in other areas of life, and her team has seen better results for most clients within six months of entering care.

“Nearly all of the clients we work with are seeing improvement in stable housing,” Reid reported. “We’re able to help people move off of the streets and find housing, and then that helps them stay engaged in other types of care and services, it helps them build success in their own lives.”

The post Clinics Improving Mental and Behavioral Health Standards appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Story by Emma VandenEinde/ Mountain West News Bureau and KUNC (Via AP Storyshare)

The Bureau of Indian Education recently extended a five-year contract of a program that provides additional mental health resources for tribal youth, impacting more than 100 tribal schools in the Mountain West.

The Behavioral Health and Wellness program allows for both Indigenous students and staff from both schools and universities to access the resources. Some of those resources offered by the program include telehealth counseling, a 24/7, BIE-focused crisis hotline, and on-site crisis support. Teresia Paul, the program lead and a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota, believes it is a “gamechanger” for Indigenous communities.

“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had a crisis situation pop up in real time, whether it’s dealing with a serious mental health challenge or dealing with a significant loss in the community,” she said. “It would have been awesome to be able to deploy our own crisis team that knows our communities.”

Some Indigenous communities believe speaking about suicide is taboo, and some cultures do not even have words that describe the act of killing oneself. But Paul said the majority of their clinical team are Indigenous people who live in the community. Whether it’s speaking their language or utilizing cultural ceremonies for healing, like sweat lodges, having members that can culturally approach the situation makes all the difference, she said.

“We’re able to really engage in those types of interventions with people who are from the communities and who know how to do those interventions respectfully,” she said. “You can’t just tap someone to step into that role. It has to be folks that have gained that respect.”

The idea to start the program came a few years prior during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many tribal members were looking for mental health resources. Many students and staff were not able to access resources at the time as they lived in remote locations where finding resources is not easy. It started mostly as training for staff members on wellness topics.

“We wanted to create and design the behavioral health and wellness program to be accessible to all be funded entities,” Paul said. “Prior to the pandemic, we really didn’t have any programs that extended that far.”

A Native-American owned small business – Tribal Tech, LLC – was awarded the contract. It helps with the technical training and assistance needed to support the BIE’s Behavioral Health and Wellness program.

“Through this contract, it’s a vehicle that we can support our students, no matter where they’re from, better than what we’ve been able to up to this point,” said Tony Dearman, the director of the Bureau of Indian Education and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

The program is crucial for many American Indian and Alaska Native students. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among 8-24 year olds in that demographic, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Paul said it’s their duty to protect their most sacred citizens – their kids.

“We’re supposed to be in the business of protecting our students and making sure that they have everything they need to be successful to thrive so that they can then be the next leaders in the generation that carries our Indigenous communities to the forefront,” she said.

This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The post Behavioral health and wellness program expanded for tribal students, staff appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Alison Berg is a journalist at Rocky Mountain PBS. You can reach her at alisonberg@rmpbs.org.

Zach Ben-Amots is an investigative multimedia journalist at Rocky Mountain PBS. You can reach him at zachben-amots@rmpbs.org.

Via AP Storyshare

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Stephen Copeland hardly knows life outside of prison.

He has spent 24 of his 65 years of life rotating through correctional facilities in the state. He can count them all and recite how long he stayed in each, and for what offense.

Most recently, Copeland did 24 years in the Limon Correctional Facility for arson.

Now living on the street in Colorado Springs, Copeland does his best to stay out of trouble by cleaning up after himself, not using drugs in front of too many people and avoiding fights. But life inside could have been worse, Copeland said. He spent his days lifting weights, socializing and trying to forget the grim realities of living inside a locked box with little to look forward to on the outside.

Other prisoners could be brutal, he said. Fights were frequent and Copeland said inmates often had to make rash decisions to protect themselves or others.

He survived as a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist gang. He was a member of Aryan Brotherhood long before prison, though Copeland said people have two choices when they’re incarcerated: join a gang or fall victim to a gang.

“I got more respect in prison than I did out here, by far,” Copeland said. “I knew all the fellows in the joint and they all knew me.”

Copeland was introduced to white supremacy as a teenager in Colorado Springs, where he grew up. He said the Aryan Brotherhood and its beliefs aren’t uncommon in Colorado’s second-largest city. On its surface, Colorado Springs is known for its proximity to Pikes Peak, military presence and its evangelical base. But the city has a dark underbelly, Copeland said. One of white supremacy, violence and heavy drug usage.

Around the same time he was introduced to violent racism, Copeland also found methamphetamine. He snorted and ingested the drug for decades, then began smoking it after his most recent exit from prison, six years ago.

Copeland is part of a growing number of people experiencing homelessness who use methamphetimine to stay awake longer and protect their belongings. While opioids used to be responsible for the majority of overdose deaths, El Paso County data show meth is now to blame for the majority share of overdoses in the Colorado Springs area.

In the early years of his usage, sobriety was a nice idea, Copeland said. Though it may never have been a real possibility, it was always a goal in the distant background.

Steven Copeland has used meth for most of his life. He is part of a growing number of people experiencing homelessness in Colorado Springs who use methamphetimine to stay awake longer and protect their belongings.

At 65, all of Copeland’s family members are dead, he has no close friends, and his days revolve around evading police and staying awake long enough to guard his belongings from other unhoused people who are seeking replacements after police take their belongings. Copeland also has Crohn’s disease, a digestive disease that makes eating difficult and often painful. He described the disease flare-ups as “you’re starving but you can’t eat because you’ll get sick.”

Denim shorts that stop just above his kneecaps reveal sores up and down Copeland’s legs. They are symptoms of the disease. He doesn’t wear a shirt, exposing more sores and bones on the upper half of his body covered by thin layers of skin.

On an April morning, he smokes a cigarette next to a group of other unhoused folks on a torn-up couch at the corner of Uintah and 19th Streets, just outside a shopping plaza with a grocery store, car wash and thrift store. The group discusses a path forward after police took an acquaintance’s sleeping bag, tent and clothing. Copeland’s belongings survived the raid. He’s not sure how, but he’s grateful.

The day is standard for Copeland: try and force himself to eat some of what he bought with his monthly $60 in food stamps, cross his fingers that the police don’t target his belongings and smoke enough meth to make life a little more bearable.

For Copeland, life without meth sounds far worse than one with it.

“Right now, reality sucks and meth is an escape from reality,” Copeland said. “I used to have pretty good control over my use, but now I don’t care anymore.”

Steven Copeland holds up his pipe to show his primary method of using meth. Copeland says he uses more meth now than ever before, calling it an effective painkiller for chronic health issues and also an escape from the challenges of homelessness.

“Meth: you can’t get away from it”

Though Copeland has few people he considers “friends,” he says he knows most unhoused people in Colorado Springs, at least those within two miles of him.

“Pretty much all of them do meth,” Copeland said of others living outside. “This is probably the meth capital of the United States. It’s everywhere. You can’t get away from it.”

Copeland said he has a few friends with indoor housing, and he occasionally exchanges drugs for a few-night’s stay. A gram of meth and an eighth of weed can buy him three nights, a few home-cooked meals and a shower. While living on the streets and forcing himself to eat dry noodles, a meal and shower are luxurious for Copeland.

The 2022 Point-in-Time Count, a survey administered annually in El Paso County measuring the county’s houseless population and factors contributing to homelessness, found 14% of unhoused people in Colorado Springs cite Substance use disorder as a reason for their homelessness.

PJ Higgins, the opioid prevention project manager for the Community Health Partnership, a Colorado Springs nonprofit that works on health equity issues, said that number doesn’t represent everyone who has substance use disorder. Most who have the disorder are not homeless, and many who are experiencing homelessness use substances but don’t cite their usage as a reason for their circumstances.

“Certainly, there’s a strong interaction between people who are homeless and substance use disorder,” Higgins said. “Substance Use Disorder does become a significant barrier to exiting homelessness.”

Homeless shelters do not allow drugs inside their facilities, and many pathways to long-term housing require sobriety as a prerequisite. Those who are ready to get sober immediately can choose rehabilitation facilities, but those are often expensive. And for many, sobriety is an ultimate goal, but the harsh realities of living outside make it feel impossible.

“When people don’t have access to care, often what happens is they turn to a substance in order to help navigate or self-medicate the condition they’re dealing with,” Higgins added. “Thinking about Substance Use Disorder not as a series of bad choices but as the result of a need to manage trauma and its impacts on mental health and state of mind and ability to navigate the ups and downs in life in a way that’s healthy is a key component of understanding.”

Melissa Chizmar is the prevention services manager at Southern Colorado Health Network, where she oversees the safe needle and supplies exchange program.

Melissa Chizmar, prevention services manager at the Southern Colorado Health Network, said of the unhoused folks she works with, more than half use methamphetamine.

“Meth, because it’s a stimulant, is going to keep people awake,” Chizmar said. “I think that’s important when you think about how cold winter nights can be and the thefts you see during that time because of exposure, which can certainly be a reason why some people might use meth, to ensure they survive the night.”

Meth and heroin are the most used substances reported among the unhoused community, Chizmar said. Meth is the most common.

Many unhoused people, Chizmar explained, turn to meth and other substances to cope with trauma – either pre-existing trauma or trauma made worse by surviving harsh winters, encampment sweeps, and general hostility, realities that come alongside homelessness.

“We definitely see here in Colorado Springs that addiction and homelessness often overlap,” Chizmar said. “Addiction doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s often a result of the environment.”

Death in small doses

Until about five years ago, opioids accounted for the majority of drug overdoses, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Data provided by the El Paso County Coroner’s Office

But according to data from the El Paso County Coroner’s Office, methamphetamine accounted for 48 of the county’s 216 drug overdoses in 2022. A combination of meth and fentanyl came just behind with 42 deaths. Fentanyl alone accounted for 36 deaths.

Drug-related accidental deaths also jumped by 55% between 2021 and 2022, according to the coroner’s data.

Fentanyl is a powerful opioid used in hospitals as a pain reliever. But the drug – which is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine – is found in much of the drug supply on the streets, often unbeknownst to the people buying and using illicit drugs. Because fentanyl is so potent, two milligrams is considered a lethal dose, according to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.

Chizmar said many who died via fentanyl overdose often had no idea they were using the potent opioid to begin with. Many thought they were using meth alone without knowing their stimulant was laced with fentanyl. Chizmar described this scenario as extremely common.

“We know that so much supply is contaminated with fentanyl that it’s essentially turning people into poly-substance users, even if that isn’t something they wanted,” Chizmar said.

Though Chizmar and Higgins said fentanyl is difficult to avoid if a person is using illicit drugs, some unhoused folks said the powerful, often lethal opioid is banned from their communities.

“If anybody caught you with it over here, you could get beat up on sight,” said Skittles, a houseless man living on the west side of Colorado Springs. “There’s a certain look with heroin and a certain look with fentanyl. I can tell the difference and fentanyl isn’t allowed.”

Skittles has lived on the streets, off and on, since he was about 12 years old. There aren’t many drugs he hasn’t tried. Though fentanyl and heroin can look similar, Skittles said he can differentiate easily from his decades of personal drug usage. He’s lost friends to fentanyl overdoses and recently revived a friend experiencing an overdose using naloxone, an overdose-reversing nasal spray.

“It was very scary because he didn’t even turn blue for a while. No warning, and by the time he turned blue, I’m sure he would have been dead and there would be no bringing him back if I didn’t know what to do,” Skittles said. “It doesn’t take much of that fentanyl sh— to kill somebody.”

The worst part, Skittles said, was the friend had no idea he was using fentanyl.

“It’s like playing Russian Roulette with five bullets,” Skittles said. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

After the friend was revived, Skittles told his friend that he needs to get fentanyl testing strips — available at most pharmacies and community health centers — as well as start carrying naloxone.

Along with clean supplies for drug use, Southern Colorado Health network provides a variety of health and hygiene products, as well as emergency supplies like naloxone in case of overdoses.

“I was like, look, dude, you’re gonna die if this happens again,” Skittles recalled, clenching a feast and staring straight ahead. “This s– is very, very bad.”

Skittles was an alcoholic for 20 years. He spends most days chasing benzodiazepines with a bottle of Kentucky Deluxe Whiskey. The combination helped him sleep through frosty winter nights and took his mind away from flashbacks of an abusive childhood.

He had enough one day.

“I just got tired of it, honestly,” Skittles said. “Just kind of happened.”

Losing friends to fentanyl and COVID-19 is common for those outside, added Jimbo, another unhoused person and one of Skittles’ friends.

“Being out here is backward,” Jimbo said. “Right is wrong and wrong is right. All your friends are dying off and you just have to keep going.”

Now, Skittles drinks alcohol on occasion and smokes cannabis to make it through his days.

He keeps a sandwich bag of weed in a jar of peanut butter. A half-ripped-off label reveals the crystalized green nuggets. He points to cannabis as a lifesaver for him and those around him.

“I’ve seen a lot of hard s— and I know what it can do, and it isn’t good,” Skittles said.

“But these days, all I want to do is hurt a cheeseburger,” he adds, cracking a half-smile and nodding his head. “Loving and hurting a cheeseburger. That’s it for me.”

Approaching solutions

Higgins and Chizmar said the war-on-drugs methods of criminalizing addiction are ineffective and often cause more harm than good, as they drive people to use illicit substances without knowing what is actually in their supply.

“We know that recovery, over the long-term, is something that’s oriented around building community and connection and finding some way to feel fulfilled and have direction,” Higgins said. “It’s difficult to do that in prison.”

Higgins said Colorado Springs needs more non-criminalization resources across the spectrum of usage, from sober living facilities, detoxification centers and simple harm reduction methods like naloxone and fentanyl test trip accessibility.

“I think there’s a lot more to treatment in terms of how we meet people where they are at,” Higgins said. “Mandated treatment tends to not be as successful as treatment that participated in on a voluntary basis.”

Though such programs have been criticized as “enabling” illicit drug usage, research does not support this. Chizmar also said clean needle access and places to safely dispose of needles is vital. Such access helps prevent the spread of diseases which can often be terminal.

“This has been an incredibly important intervention because it’s extremely effective and there’s over 30 years of research that demonstrates that,” Chizmar said. “It’s primarily a disease prevention model.”

The post Stimulants and survival: Unhoused Coloradans turn to methamphetamine as a form of protection appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

For her safety, we changed Valerie Ticone’s name in the story. YS will refer to people instead of just women when writing about abortion. According to the American Civil Liberties Union: “The more expansive and more accurate answer is anyone who can become pregnant needs to be able to get an abortion if they need or want one, including many cisgender women, some non-binary people, some intersex people, some Two Spirit people, and some trans men.”

Valerie Ticone’s first thoughts when traveling to Colorado from Texas for an abortion were if she would be able to get the time off work to heal her body, the price of flying, and the surgery itself.

“How sick will flying make me?” Ticone asked herself. “Can I handle being stuck in an airport and plane without causing a scene?”

She chose to get an abortion in Colorado because it’s legal there and because she had friends and family to stay with in the area, which lowered costs.

In September 2021 the Texas Heartbeat Bill became state law, which outlawed abortions and created a criminal cause of action against doctors who perform the procedure.

“It really frustrates me that it’s not available in Texas,” Ticone said. “It makes women [and people] feel like they have no choice. It’s not cheap to travel, let alone paying for the surgery.”

Ticone estimates her cost of the trip to be about $900, which was cheaper than she expected. The costs were less expensive because she lives in a main travel hub city with cheaper flights to Denver with the added benefit of not having to pay for lodging. The procedure costs itself range from about $500 to $700, depending on how far along the patient is. If someone has to pay for lodging — which most people would — the total cost of this trip can easily reach into the thousands of dollars.

The barriers Ticone faced from the experience ranged from having to find home remedies for nausea, traveling after the procedure, and the judgment she faced from those around her, Ticone shared.

Ticone is one of many people who travel from out of state to get abortions because of bans in their home states. In the first nine months of 2022, 2,477 out-of-state people received abortion care in Colorado, according to preliminary data from the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment, far surpassing the 1,560 people from out of state getting abortions in Colorado in 2021.

Physician Warren Hern performs abortion care at the Boulder Abortion Clinic. The clinic has been busier since the reversal of Roe Vs. Wade.

“It affects the patients,” Hern said. “It makes it impossible for many women [and people] across the country in Republican states to get a safe abortion. It takes us back to the 19th century. I think that’s a catastrophe. As far as affecting my office, we’ve been busier than usual since the Texas law went into effect in 2021.” It has also affected types of abortions that need to be performed. “Many of the women [and people] discovered they were pregnant six months ago have not been able to get abortions. They finally get to us and they’re very far along. I’ve been getting patients from all over the country for 45 years. We’re busier. We are dealing with more people who are in desperately impossible financial situations.”

Recently Hern saw two women from Texas who discovered last November they were pregnant. Both traveled, one even drove, to Florida, to get the medication abortion. In both cases the medication failed.

“They wound up seeing me, and when I saw them they were both 31 weeks pregnant,” Hern said. “That’s a very different procedure from when you’re six weeks pregnant. The pregnancy itself is more dangerous. It causes more stress. Performing the abortion is much more complicated. It takes several days instead of five minutes. It’s more expensive. It’s more stressful. It has a higher risk of complications.”

Hern sees the anti-abortion legislation as a step backward for the county.

“It’s horrifying,” Hern said. “This is a step back at least 100 years. This is not just before Roe because even before Roe vs. Wade was handed down, there were lots of safe abortions available even though sometimes they were illegal, but being done by physicians who were skilled.” But the political environment has drastically changed. “Now you have a situation where you have a police state where women [and people] are being prosecuted for having abortions. Doctors are being threatened with prison for doing abortions. That just didn’t happen 60 years ago. Sometimes there were over enthusiastic district attorneys or prosecutors that would come after doctors, but this is really a nightmare. This is not the 21st century. This is 11th century stuff. This is like the medieval inquisition and witch hunts. It’s really terribly destructive.”

In March 2023 Colorado Senate Bill 188 Protections for Accessing Reproductive Health Care passed at the state level.

“There were many people in the reproductive rights community, myself included, that were starting to get signs that Roe vs. Wade was going to be overturned,” said Senator Sonya Jaquez Lewis. Jasquez Lewis represents Boulder, Broomfield, and Weld counties and sponsored SB 188. “What we fully didn’t anticipate is how horrible some of the bills would be from surrounding states,” Lewis shared.

Reproductive rights groups in Colorado sent out alerts to like-minded folks and began drumming up donor money, with one anonymous donor giving $20 million to Planned Parenthood. A large chunk of that money was set aside to help people coming from out of state to get abortions, Lewis told us.

People coming to Colorado for abortions mainly come from Nebraska, Missouri, and Texas with those coming from Texas constituting the largest numbers, Lewis said.

With a background as a pharmacist, Lewis was also focused on protecting healthcare workers who perform abortions. Lewis explained a hypothetical situation that causes her concern. If someone from Texas, Nebraska, or Missouri takes the first dose of abortion medication Mifepristone, they have to follow it up with another dose.

“If they’re traveling during that time, they have to take it with them,” Lewis said. “If they cross into Colorado, and I as a pharmacist fill that prescription, and I go to dispense it, when they [the patient] go back, if anybody in Missouri sees the prescription bottle with my name on it, they can actually investigate me here in Colorado.. They can try to extradite me. If I was in their state they could charge me with homicide and fine me for $100,000, and then could go after my pharmacy license. That’s how unbelievably appalling some of these laws are. Texas and Nebraska have something similar, it’s just not as egregious,” Hern said.

Hern has continued practicing abortions for decades because it matters, he said.

“It matters,” Hern said. “It matters for the individual women [and people]. It matters for the families. It matters for society, and now it matters for freedom.”

Hern urges people to vote. Hearn fears that if Republicans win the 2024 presidential election, they will institute a national abortion ban.

“The American people need to understand that when they go to the polls, they vote to make these things happen,” Hern said. “If they want to make it safe for women [and people] to have basic healthcare. Safe abortion is a fundamental component of women’s healthcare. If they want that they have to vote. Right now that means they have to vote democratic. It should not be a political issue but it is. It’s about power.”

Ticone had a successful procedure and is now home working again. Ticone thinks about the people in her life for who getting an abortion was inaccessible.

“My best friend had her son because it wasn’t accessible,” Ticone said. “Her baby daddy didn’t want her traveling. She felt guilt tripped. The world is already overpopulated. This pushes kids to have kids. In the end they aren’t actually raising their kid, mostly because they don’t know how. This also causes families that are struggling to struggle more.”

The post Crossing State Lines to Get an Abortion in Colorado appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

By Leigh Paterson, KUNC (Via AP Storyshare)

Interest in the possible mental health benefits of psychedelics is growing as experiments to better understand these substances are moving ahead.

In Fort Collins, researchers at the Wholeness Center are examining the potential therapeutic use of LSD and, in particular, how—and at what dosage—it may impact people with generalized anxiety disorder.

After a lengthy screening process, study participants go to the Wholeness Center for a 12 hour day with two therapists. They are unaware of what they will be swallowing: a placebo or various amounts of LSD.

“Particularly through the second hour or the third hour, people are in a very different frame of mind,” Dr. Scott Shannon, one of the principal study investigators, said of the people who get LSD instead of the placebo. “The trees may be breathing, the couch may be moving. And some people will find this incredibly curious. Other people may be a little intimidated.”

The two therapists are there to reassure participants and calm them down. The experimental sessions taking place in Fort Collins are part of a larger study at 20 sites across the country funded by MindMed, a New York-based biotech company. The company plans to announce topline data from the clinical trials later this year.

“I tell people it’s like, if we’re living our life every day at street level then psychedelics are kind of like going up into a hot air balloon, or maybe even in a satellite, and you’re looking at your life in a very different way, and insights come,” Shannon said. “They can be scary sometimes. They can be terrifying.”

This experiment on LSD and anxiety is part of a much larger push to understand how various psychedelics can be used to treat mental health conditions. The effort involves support from corporations, universities and nonprofits. Earlier this year, the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus announced an upcoming clinical trial to test whether psilocybin can help with treatment-resistant depression.

Past research efforts have indicated that psilocybin—also called magic mushrooms—can ease anxiety, particularly for cancer patients.

“We have some suggestion that psychedelics can be helpful for anxiety, and this is a study to try to test that,” Shannon said. this quote was a little long and wordy, I think it can be shortened. The rest has already been explained outside of the quote.

Much of this research has been on hold for decades. After widespread use in the 1960s, the federal government classified psychedelics as Schedule 1 drugs, meaning they lack an accepted medical use and have a high potential for abuse.

“It really shut down research in this country for a long, long time. And it’s now just restarting,” Shannon explained.

Eventually, researchers began requesting licenses from the federal government to study some psychedelics. After encouraging results, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has allowed some of this work to move ahead more quickly by granting “breakthrough therapy” status to certain substances.

Luke Niforatos, the CEO of Protect Our Kids, a group that fights for more restrictive drug policies and recently opposed Colorado’s ballot measure to decriminalize magic mushrooms, believes in the importance of following the FDA’s process.

“I think the concern that I have is, we’re seeing a lot of kind of breathless rhetoric around the…miracle drug potential of psychedelics,” Luke Niforatos, the CEO of Protect Our Kids, a group that fights for more restrictive drug policies and recently opposed Colorado’s ballot measure to decriminalize magic mushrooms, said.

Niforatos points to the risks of other drugs like opioids and cannabis. In MindMed’s LSD trial in Fort Collins, some groups are excluded from participation: pregnant women and people with a history of psychosis. That’s because the risks of using psychedelics in these populations are not fully understood.

“That’s not to say that these drugs don’t do what everyone’s really excited about,” Niforatos said. “But what it does mean, though, is it’s still early.”

Research into a psychedelic called MDMA could be entering its final phase before possible FDA approval.

Berra Yazar-Klosinski, the chief science officer with the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation, said MDMA is further along in the process than other psychedelics thanks to a growing body of research on using it to treat mental health issues in conjunction with therapy.

She remembers looking over the results from a phase three clinical trial on using MDMA to treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, published in 2021 in the journal Nature Medicine. 88% of the participants experienced a meaningful change in their symptoms. Around two-thirds no longer met the criteria for a PTSD diagnosis.

“Oh, my gosh. It was so exciting,” Yazar-Klosinski said of the results.

Later this year, Yazar-Klosinski will be walking the FDA through the data as part of a larger request to approve MDMA-assisted therapy.

“It was such a huge surprise that everybody was just shocked and very happy for the PTSD patients and what this could mean for them,” Yazar-Klosinski said.

The post With new LSD study, researchers in Fort Collins see a future for psychedelic therapy appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

How Seth Viddal, co-founder The Natural Funeral, is normalizing human composting as a safe and useful burial option.

I asked the co-owner of The Natural Funeral Seth Viddal, a stout man with a shaved head and a righteous beard — and a dead-ringer for my mental image of Tom Bombadil — if he had heard of the term “Sky Burial.”  He laughed, “Yes! It’s reserved for special deaths, for dignitaries.  But, it’s where the body is placed on top of a mountain to attract vultures to come to digest the body and distribute it back to the earth.”

From a certain distance, the Tibetan ritual of Sky Burial reads as a decorative rug covering the ‘Ick factor’ of the actual practice. However, when viewed from a perspective within the culture, the rite leads to divination by allowing the spirit to become one with heaven and re-enter the cycle of reincarnation once a vulture has finished digesting the remains.

The ‘Ick Factor,’ as Viddal calls it, has plagued the idea of human composting as a valid and safe method of disposing of one’s dead since before even he was aware of the possibility.  In 2020,  Rep. Brianna Titone, D-Arvada, and Sen. Robert Rodriguez, D-Denver, proposed legislation for human composting with bill HB1060. This method of composting had been used for livestock and was proven to be sustainable; however, it met opposition from both Christian and Jewish leadership before it was completely derailed by the COVID outbreak. The bill didn’t make it through session.

Later in 2021, a prospective client actually brought the idea of human composting to Viddal who, up until that point, hadn’t known composting a human body would be an option for burial. Viddal  immediately used the resources at his disposal and lobbied the Colorado Energy and Environmental sub-committee to provide the service. A new bill, SB21-006, was also making its way through the legislature. The bill allowed for the use of containers to accelerate the process of decomposition. On September 7, 2021, human composting became a legal form of burial with two specific caveats: first, the soil made from human composting cannot be sold; second, whatever is grown within said soil cannot be used for human consumption.  This made Colorado the second state to allow for such a service, the first being Washington State in 2018.

During this process, Viddal began working on the vessel to contain the body that he would later dub the “chrysalis.” The chrysalis is constructed with dimensions roughly the same as a normal casket.  The appearance and shape of its construction, however, is more time-capsule than coffin as the wooden box the body is kept within is bookended with wooden wheels.  The wheels provide for easy transportation, allowing it to be rolled in and out of the warehouse wherein it is kept.  Further, inside the casket, the body is laid upon a bed of alfalfa and wood chips.  Additionally, grieving families are allowed to place mementos of their lost loved one within the chrysalis as long as they are things that will properly degrade during the process (wine, grounds from their favorite coffee, etc.).  Within about six to nine months the family will be welcome to claim the soil that remains once the process is finished.

The Chrysalis, photo provided by The Natural Funeral

The first service of human composting on September 22, 2021 sent a knock that could be felt throughout the nation. The Natural Funeral has performed seventy-five human composting funerals as of this article, and they’ve been sought by people from outside the state for their service.  Considering the demand, they are still shockingly the only funeral home in Colorado to perform this service.

Though it is highly likely that number will grow, Viddal was very clear that every service he performs is special.  “I never want to be callous,” Viddal remarked when asked about how he mentally prepares to begin a process that will inevitably turn a human into soil.  “You want to feel grounded,” he said with his eyes closed, perhaps visualizing taking his first steps, shoulders braced for carrying the weight. An Atlas-like undertaking, the word ‘service’ brings with it all planetary heft of a grieving family— a story has ended, a space created where it wasn’t wanted, and lives must now learn to move with a different rhythm.

The opposition to human composting still remains. The Catholic Church has said that it still does not support the idea of human composting citing safety concerns, and the Jewish leaders have had mixed reactions as some see it occupying the same space as cremation while others oppose death having a tangible benefit.

Although Viddal admits that human composting is a net good for the environment, he never influences the choice on the grieving family.  Dealing with the remains of a loved one is never easy. Composting a human may give some reservations, however, with Oregon legalizing the practice in the summer of 2021, and four more states also legalizing the practice, it shows that the winds are changing direction. Further, since human composting has been proven to be safe and good for the environment — and as long as those choices made for the deceased were made with care — navigating the ick becomes easier.  Just as Viddal stated whether  its Tibetan rituals involving vulture poop or humans becoming soil, “It’s all beautiful.”

The post Human Composting: Navigating the “Ick Factor” appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Life is about knowing when to roll the dice. CPR survival rates are lower than the odds of guessing a number correctly if you toss one of those dice. But CPR is still a skill everybody should learn.

Sunlight filters through the cottonwoods, and the babble of water echoes in your ears. The laughter of 20-somethings blends in with the sounds of the rushing water. The peace is shattered as one of the laughs transforms into a scream. You watch in terror as an unconscious young man is pulled to the riverbank. One of his friends is screaming, “Jacob isn’t breathing!”

Most people aren’t first responders, so TV and other media fill in the blanks. About 95% of people learn about CPR from TV. You might remember seeing Damar Hamlin getting CPR on Monday Night Football. Or you may recall scenes post-CPR on medical dramas, the doctors with perfect hair saying everything will be ok.

If you’re lucky, you think of NBC’s The Office’s first aid failure and remember that you need to push on his chest hard and fast to the beat of the “Staying Alive.” Unfortunately, you are frozen.

Another bystander dials 911, and paramedics arrive, start CPR, and take him to the hospital. You probably think things are going to be ok now. Research shows most adults think CPR has a 75% chance of success but, unfortunately, the odds aren’t in his favor.

When CPR is done outside of the hospital, about one in ten people survive. In the hospital, between two to four out of ten survive . Though the odds are nowhere close to assumed success rates, immediate CPR increases survival rates significantly, by three to four times. Per Timothy Meyers, M.D., the Chair of Emergency Medicine at Boulder Community Health, “The sooner the CPR gets started, the higher the success rate in terms of outcomes.”

What is CPR, really?

The heart beats over 10,000 times daily to move 2,000 gallons of blood over 60,000 miles of blood vessels to deliver oxygen and nutrients and remove waste. A stop in this flow is deadly. 

“[People who have a] prolonged downtime [before CPR begins]…  unfortunately don’t have a good neurological recovery… it’s a life-changing event for them. The success rate of CPR undoubtedly goes up if it’s started within the first two minutes [of the heart stopping].” Said Dr. Meyers. 

Brain cells begin to die when deprived of blood flow for around four minutes, causing irreversible damage. Death follows minutes to seconds after brain cells die. CPR moves blood in the body when the heart cannot, hopefully keeping cells alive.

“The technique itself is really pretty straightforward… The biggest goal is to restore blood flow quickly by pushing on the chest, which indirectly compresses the heart…[which] stimulates the blood to start flowing around the circulatory system again.” Explained Dr.Meyers.

High-quality compressions must be both hard and fast. Compressions must push the chest down two inches and be done 100-125 times every minute. Think about pushing to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive.” Or, if you’ve spent any time around a toddler, “Baby Shark” might be easier to remember.

“CPR used to be equally focused on breathing and compressions fairly early on…We really have sort of moved away from that.” Continued Dr. Meyers. Good news for bystander CPR. There are only two steps to take, dialing 911 and starting chest compressions.

CPR success is greatly enhanced when it is paired with a defibrillator, a medical device that helps reset the heart. Fortunately, defibrillators are widely available outside of doctors’ offices and hospitals.  Most businesses and public spaces like libraries and schools have Automated External Defibrillators (AED’s) on their premises. The Colorado Legislature passed HB1183- Automated External Defibrillators In Public Places in 2019 to help expand access.

CPR is a lifesaving tool, but it isn’t without risk. “Broken ribs are certainly fairly common after CPR… [along with] rib pain, [and] rib injury,” Clarified Meyers. These broken ribs can puncture nearby organs such as the lungs. But these risks should not be seen as a deterrent if a person suddenly collapses. “Especially if it’s a family member or a loved one, why not give them that chance?” 

Pushing Deeper  

TV mostly shows young CPR survivors. One study found an average age of 36 years shown in medical dramas. They suffered accidents like almost drowning or a car crash, but were otherwise healthy. CPR works best for these patients. It also works well when there is a problem with the heart itself, like a heart attack or cardiac arrest like Damar Hamlin. CPR keeps people alive so these reversible problems can be fixed.

When the heart stops due to cancer, heart disease, or another irreversible chronic illness, CPR survival rates are abysmal, only one in one hundred compared to typical odds. These survivors rarely return to their former quality of life. Sometimes the damage to the body to the body before CPR makes people completely reliant on life support or even causes brain death. An especially cruel irony for those whose conditions leave them with only months to live.

“You can’t get around it. [CPR] is violent. People say, ‘Oh, don’t use those terms.’ [As if] somehow, by telling people this, you’re manipulating them. But no, you need to tell them.” Explained Rebecca Gagne-Henderson, Ph.D. a Nurse Practitioner (NP) with 27 years of experience in palliative care and hospice care.

For those with reversible conditions, CPR’s pain is a small price to pay for a second chance at life. But is it a price worth paying for those who have weakened bodies from irreversible conditions, who only have months to live?

“I have only seen one [patient], who was on palliative care actually survive… and leave the hospital. She went to the nursing home, and she was going to be bedbound. And the son was like ‘see you were wrong. You were wrong.’ She died two weeks later. What did those two weeks look like, for her?” said Gagne-Henderson. When it comes to staying alive- should we prioritize the length of time? Or the quality? 

It can be hard to breach the conversation of quantity vs. quality of life, even for doctors. Gange-Henderson reflected “When I would round as the palliative NP [in the] ICU… I would listen to the residents giving report [on patients with complete life support measures who were] a full code! And that’s when I would say, ‘I have a question…Do you think that your patient is a candidate for CPR?’ It’s something they hadn’t even considered!” Said Gagne-Henderson while shaking her head

“[Families often] want CPR,  because it will make them well. So I would ask them, ‘What does well look like to you?’  and for me, I wouldn’t want CPR if afterward I couldn’t get up and make a cup of tea and care for myself… if I can’t do that, then CPR is going to make my life worse.”  Said Gagne-Henderson.

Conversations about if CPR fits in with wishes for what wellness means can begin with a primary care physician. While it’s a conversation that can be difficult, knowing what life-saving measures fit for each person ensures everyone’s transition from life to death is peaceful. 

What to do if somebody needs CPR (A refresher for the CPR certified and and introduction to all others)

Let’s go back to Boulder Creek Trail. We now know it’s critical to get emergency aid to Jacob right away. Do not wait for somebody else to act. Try to wake the unconscious person up by shaking their shoulder. If they are not responsive, check for a pulse on the unconscious person’s neck. If there is no pulse, it’s time to act fast to save a life.

If others are around during a medical emergency, enlist their help. In Jacob’s case, point at one of his friends and tell them to dial 911. Point to another, and tell them to go to a nearby building and see if they have AED. Directly pointing at people and telling them what to do may seem rude, but it helps prevent people from freezing during an emergency. The vast majority of public spaces like schools,libraries, and businesses have AEDs on their premises. Most AEDS will give users verbal instructions, and if they don’t 911 operators can give instructions. If the unconscious person is wet, try to dry the victim’s chest before applying AED pads. 

Once 911 is called, and an AED is on the way, it’s time to start 2-inch deep chest compressions. Push to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive” or “Baby Shark.” Try not to pause for more than 10 seconds. While it may seem weird not to give rescue breaths, new research points to hands-only CPR being just as effective.

If you’re by yourself and have a phone dial 911 before starting chest compressions. If you’re by yourself without phone access, do chest compressions for 2 minutes before finding a phone and calling 911 for help.The best way to learn CPR is by taking a class. Classes are available through the American Heart Association and The Red Cross. 

In the case of Jacob, quick CPR and a shock from the AED resulted in a bewildered man coughing up water as paramedics reached the scene. He was taken to a hospital and diagnosed with broken ribs but will go on to enjoy another day with sunshine through the cottonwoods. Hopefully, doing more than just stayin’ alive.

The post CPR: More than Staying Alive appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

by Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun (AP Storyshare)

An anti-abortion activist is challenging Colorado’s 30-year-old prohibition on approaching people within 100 feet of the entrance of a health care facility to pass them a leaflet, display a sign or engage in “oral protest, education or counseling.”

The 1993 ban, sometimes called the “bubble law,” was enacted by the legislature as a way to shield women getting an abortion from harassment, though it doesn’t apply just to abortion clinics.

The law has faced legal challenges before, including one that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 and was rejected by a 6-3 vote.

The new lawsuit was filed June 1 in federal court by Wendy Faustin, who “believes that abortion is a horrific moral wrong” and “wishes to personally and compassionately talk to women seeking abortions and give them further information related to the procedure and other available options.”

The defendants include Gov. Jared Polis, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, Denver District Attorney Beth McCann and Denver police Chief Ron Thomas. The attorney general’s office doesn’t comment on active litigation.

Faustin is also challenging a similar, municipal-level bubble law enacted by Denver’s City Council. She argues the laws violate her First Amendment free speech rights, as well as her 14th Amendment rights to equal protection under the nation’s laws.

Faustin appears to be hoping to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2000 ruling on Colorado’s bubble law now that there’s a conservative majority on the court.

Last year, the court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent guaranteeing a minimum level of abortion access across the country. That decision called the court’s 2000 ruling on Colorado’s bubble law a distortion of First Amendment doctrines.

“Plaintiff acknowledges that the result she seeks is contrary to currently governing precedent as set forth by the majority opinion in Hill,” the lawsuit says. “But for the reasons explained by the dissents in that case and in later Supreme Court precedent, that case was wrongly decided, is irreconcilable.”

Faustin is represented by lawyers for the First Liberty Institute, a Christian nonprofit based in Texas.

More broadly, Colorado is becoming a legal battleground when it comes to abortion. There’s already a pending federal lawsuit challenging the state’s new, first-in-the-nation ban on the so-called abortion pill reversal treatment. A failed effort to block an abortion clinic from opening up in Pueblo was set to test Colorado’s 2022 law enshrining abortion access in statute.

Colorado’s bubble law specifically creates an 8-foot buffer zone for people within 100 feet of a health care facility’s entrance. The state law carries a penalty of jail time and/or a fine for violators.

Other states and cities have bubble laws, too. The outcome of the case in Colorado could affect policies in those places.

“Colorado’s ‘bubble law’ has survived not one but two Supreme Court challenges,” Dani Newsum, director of strategic partnerships at Cobalt, a Colorado abortion rights nonprofit, said in a written statement. “Patients should have a right to access health care, including abortion care, without being harassed. At a time when violence, threats and harassment against abortion clinics, patients and providers is escalating, patients should be left alone to get the health care they need and deserve in peace.”

The case is in its early stages in U.S. District Court. There’s no timeline for when it will be resolved.

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By Sam Tabachnik, The Denver Post (via AP Storyshare)

Residents in Colorado’s mobile home parks have long scoffed when asked if they drink the community’s water.

It’s hardly even a question to think about. The answer: No, never. The liquid smells bad or looks like rust, they say. It stains dishes and sheets.

State lawmakers listened to these concerns — and now Colorado will embark on a multiyear effort to address them.

HB23-1257, signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis on Monday, will launch a statewide effort to test the water quality in mobile home parks that fall through the cracks of existing testing mechanisms. If testing reveals an issue, the park operator will need to complete a remediation plan and provide safe water for residents.

“It feels very empowering,” said Rep. Elizabeth Velasco, D-Glenwood Springs, and one of the bill’s co-sponsors. “We’re finally listening to our communities and supporting working families.”

The legislation — co-sponsored by Rep. Andrew Boesenecker, D-Fort Collins, and Sens. Lisa Cutter, D-Jefferson County, and Kevin Priola, D-Henderson — also addresses concerns that go beyond federally mandated testing for contaminants, including the water’s color, odor and taste.

It will be enforced by the Water Quality Control Division inside the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the state attorney general.

On top of the testing requirements, the legislation also creates a $3.6 million grant program to help park owners, nonprofit entities and local governments address water quality issues.

Water quality issues will be added to the database created by the Mobile Home Park Oversight Program, which tracks complaints against park owners.

Velasco, who grew up in mobile home parks in Colorado’s high country, notes that this bill is just the beginning.

“We want to make sure there is clean water everywhere,” she said.

The bill marks the fifth year in a row that the state legislature approved a bill concerning mobile home parks and residents. Previous legislation sought to make it easier for residents to purchase the land on which their homes sit, allowed the attorney general to enforce provisions of the Mobile Home Park Act and limited the number of times park owners could increase rent per year.

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Special Thanks to KUNC | By Leigh Paterson (AP Storyshare)

Nearly one year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the number of people traveling to states where abortion is still legal has surged. In Colorado, the volume of out-of-state patients more than doubled between 2021 and 2022.

Because of the increase in need for services, everyone is having to wait longer for in-person care—including Colorado residents.

Mar Galvez, a non-binary 23-year-old who works for the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR), could relate.

“I actually found out I was pregnant on the day that Dobbs was announced and Roe was overturned,” said Galvez, then a student living in Boulder. “I realized I was eight weeks pregnant at the time. It felt surreal…It didn’t feel like it was something that I was holding evidence of in my hands.”

When Galvez found out they were pregnant, they knew they wanted an abortion—and they knew who to call.

But they were unable to get an appointment within a few weeks at any of the nearby clinics. Instead, they found an online organization that connected them with a provider over telehealth who could prescribe them mail-order abortion pills.

“It is painful and it is scary, but it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t precisely the decision that I wanted for myself,” Galvez said of their abortion. “The only thing I felt afterwards and during it was a relief that I had access to that care.”

Clinics across the state are experiencing increased demand. Following the Dobbs decision last June, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains’ 14 Colorado clinics had wait times of up to 28 days for abortion appointments. More recently, patients can expect to wait around 10 days, still a significantly longer wait than in years past.

“Ten days matters,” Adrienne Mansanares, the president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) said of the risk in increased wait times.

Abortions pills, the most common abortion option today, are approved only through 10 weeks of pregnancy.

“We’ll have patients who make an appointment for a medication abortion…We get them all ready to go and when they come in, they’re too far along for a medication abortion,” Mansanares said.

Statewide, the majority of out-of-state patients are coming from Texas after an abortion ban took effect there in 2021. In the past, around 10% of PPRM’s patients in Colorado have come from out-of-state. So far this year, that number has hovered around 40%.

“These numbers are just remarkable,” Mansanares said. “We’ve never seen anything like that before.”

Resources in the state are being stretched thin as providers adjust to the increase in need.

Abortion funds like Cobalt Abortion Fund are being inundated by patients who need help paying for out-of-state travel. So far this year, the Colorado non-profit has spent over $126,000 on financial assistance for individuals seeking abortion care, more than twice what the organization had spent at this time last year.

Clinics are bringing on more staff. Wait times for routine reproductive care like pap smears have increased, too, in some locations.

“We are doing a lot more clinical time,” Dr. Rebecca Cohen, the chief medical officer of Comprehensive Women’s Health Center in Denver, said. “Our nurses, our staff are, you know, are staying late, doing all the things because people need us.”

Cohen said generally, demand is still high, although she is seeing fewer patients seeking abortions early in pregnancy. She thinks many of them are accessing medication abortion care online.

Plus, for those with health insurance, more options have come available in recent months. This past fall the Colorado health care giant Kaiser Permanente announced it was expanding abortion services in response to long wait times at other clinics.

In her clinic, Cohen is now seeing higher volumes of women further along in their pregnancies, with more complications.

“To hear that someone is coming to see us after it’s taken them three months to get money together—we are where we are,” Cohen said with a sigh. “Those are the things that break my heart, is just knowing that if they had felt safe enough to reach out earlier we could have helped more.”

Meanwhile, Colorado lawmakers are working to further secure access to abortion services. Gov. Polis recently signed three reproductive health bills into law, including one that shields out-of-state patients and providers from criminal prosecution should they seek or practice abortion services in Colorado.

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By Markian Hawryluk | KHN (AP Storyshare)

One in 4 Colorado teens reported they could get access to a loaded gun within 24 hours, according to survey results published Monday. Nearly half of those teens said it would take them less than 10 minutes.

“That’s a lot of access and those are short periods of time,” said Virginia McCarthy, a doctoral candidate at the Colorado School of Public Health and the lead author of the research letter describing the findings in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics.

The results come as Coloradans are reeling from yet another school shooting. On March 22, a 17-year-old student shot and wounded two school administrators at East High School in Denver. Police later found his body in the mountains west of Denver in Park County and confirmed he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Another East High student was fatally shot in February while sitting in his car outside the school.

The time it takes to access a gun matters, McCarthy said, particularly for suicide attempts, which are often impulsive decisions for teens. In research studying people who have attempted suicide, nearly half said the time between ideation and action was less than 10 minutes. Creating barriers to easy access, such as locking up guns and storing them unloaded, extends the time before someone can act on an impulse, and increases the likelihood that they will change their mind or that someone will intervene.

“The hope is to understand access in such a way that we can increase that time and keep kids as safe as possible,” McCarthy said.

The data McCarthy used comes from the Healthy Kids Colorado Study, a survey conducted every two years with a random sampling of 41,000 students in middle and high school. The 2021 survey asked, “How long would it take you to get and be ready to fire a loaded gun without a parent’s permission?”

American Indian students in Colorado reported the greatest access to a loaded gun, at 39%, including 18% saying they could get one within 10 minutes, compared with 12% of everybody surveyed. American Indian and Native Alaskan youths also have the highest rates of suicide.

Nearly 40% of students in rural areas reported having access to firearms, compared with 29% of city residents.

The findings were released at a particularly tense moment in youth gun violence in Colorado. Earlier this month, hundreds of students left their classrooms and walked nearly 2 miles to the state Capitol to advocate for gun legislation and safer schools. The students returned to confront lawmakers again last week in the aftermath of the March 22 high school shooting.

The state legislature is considering a handful of bills to prevent gun violence, including raising the minimum age to purchase or possess a gun to 21; establishing a three-day waiting period for gun purchases; limiting legal protections for gun manufacturers and sellers; and expanding the pool of who can file for extreme risk protection orders to have guns removed from people deemed a threat to themselves or others.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, firearms became the leading cause of death among those ages 19 or younger in 2020, supplanting motor vehicle deaths. And firearm deaths among children increased during the pandemic, with an average of seven children a day dying because of a firearm incident in 2021.

Colorado has endured a string of school shootings over the past 25 years, including at Columbine High School in 1999, Platte Canyon High School in 2006, Arapahoe High School in 2013, and the STEM School Highlands Ranch in 2019.

Although school shootings receive more attention, the majority of teen gun deaths are suicides.

“Youth suicide is starting to become a bigger problem than it ever has been,” said Dr. Paul Nestadt, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

“Part of that has to do with the fact that there’s more and more guns that are accessible to youth.”

While gun ownership poses a higher risk of suicide among all age groups, teens are particularly vulnerable, because their brains typically are still developing impulse control.

“A teen may be bright and know how to properly handle a firearm, but that same teen in a moment of desperation may act impulsively without thinking through the consequences,” said Dr. Shayla Sullivant, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. “The decision-making centers of the brain are not fully online until adulthood.”

Previous research has shown a disconnect between parents and their children about access to guns in their homes. A 2021 study found that 70% of parents who own firearms said their children could not get their hands on the guns kept at home. But 41% of kids from those same families said they could get to those guns within two hours.

“Making the guns inaccessible doesn’t just mean locking them. It means making sure the kid doesn’t know where the keys are or can’t guess the combination,” said Catherine Barber, a senior researcher at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, who was not involved in the study. “Parents can forget how easily their kids can guess the combination or watch them input the numbers or notice where the keys are kept.”

If teens have their own guns for hunting or sport, those, too, should be kept under parental control when the guns are not actively being used, she said.

The Colorado researchers now plan to dig further to find out where teens are accessing guns in hopes of tailoring prevention strategies to different groups of students.

“Contextualizing these data a little bit further will help us better understand types of education and prevention that can be done,” McCarthy said.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

The post As Colorado Reels From Another School Shooting, Study Finds 1 in 4 Teens Have Quick Access to Guns appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

By Shay Castle
Boulder Beat (AP Storyshare)

The first time Charlie Bigsby was offered a kidney, things looked promising. The potential donor, a long-time friend, made it through the initial health screen and subsequent testing. But then the news came down: He was pre-diabetic, and therefore ineligible to donate.

The next friend to offer drove all the way from Kansas City, only to be told he might have heart problems down the road. Another person was in perfect health, but the wrong blood type. A fourth was screened out for unknown reasons, though a long-past history of drug use may have played a role.

Charlie would be offered a kidney three more times. None of them panned out, leaving the 56-year-old Longmont resident and Boulder business owner chained to a dialysis machine for 10 hours a day to do the job two healthy organs used to perform.

Charlie is in late-stage kidney failure, one of 1,130 Coloradans who last year were on the waitlist for a kidney.

The number of organs available is higher than ever, but it’s still not enough for the thousands of people across the country in need of a transplant. They will wait, on average, three to five years for someone — living or dead — to give them a chance at health, all the while watching the ticking clock of their own declining kidney function.

“This whole thing,” Charlie said, “it’s been a whole lot of hurry up and wait.”

One of the good guys

Charlie is a man of few words. In his business, you don’t need them.

Charlie is the owner of Charley’s Garage, a Toyota-only repair shop in north Boulder where he’s worked for 30 years. He’s actually the second Charlie to own the business — hence the spelling discrepancy — taking over as manager from Charles Miller years ago. He finally purchased the garage in spring 2021.

It was love of the job that led Charlie to choose peritoneal dialysis, a treatment thankfully open to him because of his relative good health. Each night at 7, in his Longmont home, he hooks up to a machine that filters his blood by depositing and then draining a cleansing fluid into his abdomen. There he stays until 5 a.m. — reading, relaxing, watching TV, and finally falling asleep.

The other option is hemodialysis, which would require him to visit a medical center or hospital two to three times a week, three to four hours at a time.

Being hooked up to the at-home machine every night allows him to be at the shop all day, loyal heeler in tow. The rescue dogs — there have been several over the years — have become as much a part of the customer experience as the expectation of good work for a fair price.

I have “gratitude for a local business that is fair, competent, reliable, easy to work with, and has friendly dogs that greet you with a wagging tail at the door,” said Jenny Askey, a Boulder resident whose family “has been taking our Toyotas to Charlie for nearly 20 years.”

Askey appreciates the times Charlie has accommodated emergency repairs, despite typically being booked out for several weeks. She knows Charlie will never recommend unnecessary repairs, and that he’ll charge fairly for his services.

“He kept several of our Toyotas rolling for over 300,000 miles each,” Askey said. “We have not been sorry. Ever.”

When the power steering “puked out” on Michael Sacks’ 1990 Toyota pickup, Charlie bought a $25 piece of plumbing hardware instead of the $700 part it called for. The truck ran until late last year, when Charlie and Sacks together decided the cost of repairs was no longer worth it.

“It’s like when the vet tells me you have to let your dog go,” Sacks said.

Keeping high-mileage Toyotas on the road has become something of a specialty for Charlie, who is known up and down the Front Range for his professional and personal love of and care for cars.

“Anybody in the car world knows who Charlie is,” said Allan Wyatt, who met Charlie through a group of English motoring enthusiasts that gather in Arvada. Wyatt worked for Boulder’s Barnsley Tire before recently moving to a motorcycle shop in Fort Collins.

“They’ve heard of Charlie’s Garage,” Wyatt said of his new co-workers. “Half of them drive Toyotas.”

The car community in Colorado is small, Wyatt explained. “Everybody knows everybody else. They know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.”

Charlie, he said, is one of the good guys.

“You’re never going to hear a bad thing about Charlie. He’s not one to toot his own horn, but he’s a very giving, very caring person. He’s quiet; he can almost seem standoffish, but he’s not. He’d give you the shirt off his back.”

“If anybody deserves” a kidney, Wyatt said, “it’s Charlie.”

Charlie Bigsby eyes the dialysis machine he uses for 10 hours each night at his Longmont home Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023. (B Goodell / Unboxed Photography)

Transplants increasing

Local shops like Barnsley helped spread the word about Charlie’s condition, posting flyers on their counters: “Local Car Guy Needs a Kidney.” A friend printed and passed out yard signs.

It was difficult for Charlie to ask for help, he said. But it’s a critical part of the transplant process, according to Christine Opp, living donor coordinator at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center in Denver.

“Not everybody is comfortable with that, putting that out there, but it’s hugely successful,” Opp said. “People do news articles, they put things on a billboard, they get shirts made, bumper stickers, car magnets, yard signs, social media.”

St. Luke’s teaches a class to recipients and their loved ones, instructing them to find a “champion” or advocate to lead awareness campaigns. On average, recipients get three offers from living donors. There are outliers: Opp recalls one patient who garnered 20 interested parties, and another, 99.

Sixty percent of patients “do not ask one person to donate to them,” Opp said, but instead wait — and hope.

Someone waiting for a kidney is more likely to receive an organ from a deceased donor than a living one. In 2022, 76% of the 25,799 kidney transplants were deceased donors.

Last year was a record one for kidney transplants, said Dr. Peter Kennealey, surgical director of kidney and pancreas transplantation at University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora — part of a 12-year trend.

That’s due to a few things: better treatment for Hepatitis C, allowing infected organs to be transplanted and easily cured with medication; and advancements in technology to preserve kidneys after cardiac death. The opioid crisis has also helped, Kennealey said, a macabre silver lining to a devastating epidemic.

“There’s more people dying that are viable donors. They OD, they have a brain injury, but they have good kidneys. So we can take these really good kidneys from, in many instances, very young donors.”

Even with the number of deceased donors increasing, it’s still not enough for the tens of thousands of people who need a kidney. As of March 16, 88,813 people in the United States were waiting for a transplant, according to UNOS, the United Network for Organ Sharing. More than 20,000 people are added to the list each year; kidneys account for 85% of all organ transplants.

Sixty-eight percent of Coloradans have signaled their intent to become organ donors. Yet because so few deaths result in viable organs — about three in 1,000, according to the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration — having a bigger pool of potential donors is critical.

“There’s really not a downside to doing it,” Kennealey said. “You can’t take your organs with you.”

—> Become an organ donor: Sign up when you receive or renew your driver’s license, or anytime through Donate Life Colorado

Marcie Bigsby embraces her husband, Charlie, in the garage at their Longmont home Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023. Both are car enthusiasts and collectors. (B Goodell / Unboxed Photography)

‘We would never put them at risk’

Living donors are preferred because their kidneys have a longer lifespan: 15-20 years, on average, versus eight to 12 years for a kidney from a deceased donor.

It’s also a much quicker process. Living donors can be approved within a month after initial contact, provided they pass the health tests.

About 40% of would-be donors are screened out, Opp said. Weight is the biggest factor, because of its contribution to diabetes and high blood pressure — the two leading causes of kidney disease. Potential donors are assessed not only for their current health, but their potential to develop conditions in the future.

“They have to be in amazing health,” Opp said, “because this is an elective procedure. We would never put them at risk.”

—> Interested in becoming a living donor? You can direct your kidney to Charlie Bigsby, or do a non-directed donation. Call Presbyterian/St. Luke’s at 720.754.2155 option 3 or email LivingDonorsPSL@HealthONEcares.com. Visit PSLMC.com/KidneyCenter for more information and/or to fill out an initial health questionnaire

The comprehensive screening includes an initial online health questionnaire, the signing of consent forms, then a phone call with an advocate to assess donors’ grasp of the process and ensure they have an adequate support system. That is followed by two days of testing at the hospital, after which surgery is scheduled.

The surgery is done laparoscopically, with four small incisions in the stomach that are sealed with glue. Living donor surgeries are performed on Mondays; by Wednesday, they’re going home — provided they can take food and liquids by mouth, and pass gas by rear.

Donor’s stomachs are inflated with CO2 during the procedure, to give the surgeon’s room to work. The biggest complaint from patients, according to Opp, is pain in the shoulder or chest caused by the gas, known as referred pain.

Charlie Bigsby works on one of the cars in his private collection at his Longmont home Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023. (B Goodell / Unboxed Photography)

‘Unfavorable combination’

The entire process is confidential for living donors, one reason why Charlie doesn’t know why none of the seven offers resulted in a transplant.

There was one person cleared to donate: his wife, Marcie. She’s not the right blood type, but is hoping for a paired exchange, in which another potential donor has Charlie’s blood type, and that potential donor’s designated recipient has Marcie’s.

Last year, paired donation accounted for more than one-fifth of all living donor kidney transplants in the U.S. In 2008, that number was practically zero in 2008, according to Dr. Kennealey.

“With the utilization of modern technology, GPS tracking and better partnerships with commercial airlines,” he said, “we can facilitate transplants from Hawaii to Boston.”

With Charlie and Marcie, there’s one catch: While he is the most in-demand blood type, O, she is the rarest, AB, severely limiting the pool of potential donor-recipient pairs.

Said Opp, “That’s the most unfavorable combination you can have.”

Charlie Bigsby eyes the dialysis machine he uses for 10 hours each night at his Longmont home Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023. (B Goodell / Unboxed Photography)

‘This will be what kills me’

While there are many factors that go into prioritizing someone for a kidney, compatibility is a major consideration. Someone who has been waiting less time than Charlie could receive a kidney first, if it’s a better fit for them.

Without a living donor directing their kidney to Charlie, he will remain on dialysis.

Dialysis shortens a person’s lifespan, even as it keeps them alive.

“The life expectancy on dialysis is poor,” Kennealey said. “It depends on your disease, your age, your co-morbidities.  A 25-year-old can survive for decades on dialysis, but if you’re 65 and you’ve had two heart attacks and you’re on oxygen, your life expectancy is poor.”

“They can live forever on dialysis,” Opp clarified, “but their life expectancy is decreasing the longer they’re on it.”

The median number of months on dialysis is 39 months, Kennealey said. “Half the people fail before 39 months, half are after.”

Failure means moving to hemodialysis for some people already receiving peritoneal treatment — or death. Last year in Colorado, 36 people died waiting for a transplant, according to the National Kidney Foundation.

Charlie has been on dialysis for 35 months, since April 9, 2020.

He and Marcie know the facts; they’ve done the research. But “I don’t want to think about the number,” Marcie said. “It’s easier to remain positive as a person if you’re not dwelling on what some statistic is.”

Charlie also prefers to not give much thought to his predicament. He goes about his business at the shop, manages his dialysis and diet and endless doctor appointments, and takes care of his cars and dogs.

But in a quiet moment, he admits to being scared sometimes. It’s an odd thought, he said, dealing with your probable and impending death.

“More than likely,” Charlie said, “this will be what kills me.”

Even with a transplant, his health saga will continue. There’s the lifelong medication regime, the constant check-ups, increased risk of skin cancer and, even if all goes perfectly, another transplant in the future.

“It’s not a cure,” Opp said. “It’s a treatment option.”

There are checkups: at six months, one year and two years. All costs of the surgery are covered, as are any related costs incurred within a year after donation. And, if a donor ever needs a kidney in the future, they are given the highest priority for a transplant.

Donors will need to take good care of their remaining kidney for the rest of their lives, drinking two to four liters of water per day and maintaining a healthy weight. Regular physical activity can continue, so long as it doesn’t involve getting hit regularly and repeatedly in the lower back.

“We have skiers, hikers, cyclists, people who go to the gym daily,“ Opp said. “They don’t even know they have one less organ.”

The post Beloved Front Range mechanic in need of kidney transplant appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

By Ann Schimke, Chalkbeat Colorado (AP Storyshare)

Roxana Alvarado Martinéz, a high school sophomore, had told only close friends she was seeing a therapist to help her with anxiety and insomnia.

But that changed this month in the civics classroom where she serves as a teacher’s assistant. The teacher plucked slips of paper from the “Sol y Nubes” — sun and clouds — box, where students can anonymously share struggles or excitement.

That day, as the discussion touched on depression, bullying, and suicide, Roxana spoke up.

“There is no shame, absolutely no shame in you having a therapist or me having a therapist,” she told the class at Summit High School in Breckenridge. “I could help you get connected if that’s what you need.”

Roxana is part of a generation that has grappled with unprecedented mental health struggles over the last few years amid a pandemic that stoked stress, fear, and isolation for people young and old. She’s also one of thousands of Colorado youth taking advantage of a growing number of programs that aim to make mental health support more accessible and affordable for young people.

These programs include the state’s “I Matter” program, which provides six free telehealth or in-person counseling sessions to students in elementary through high school. So far, the program has served more than 5,600 students statewide.

There are a variety of local programs, too. Roxana, 16, received a scholarship to cover the cost of therapy from Building Hope Summit County, a mental health nonprofit. The Aurora school district east of Denver began offering students six free counseling sessions a year ago and the neighboring Cherry Creek district began offering eight to 10 free sessions to middle and high schoolers in December. Both districts contract with Hazel Health, a telehealth company based in San Francisco.

It’s hard to know if Colorado youth are getting all the help they need. During the first nine months of 2022, mental health-related visits to emergency departments in the Children’s Hospital Colorado system were up 74% compared with the same period in 2019, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

That’s part of the reason why local and state leaders continue to push for easy-access mental health support for children and teens before a full-blown crisis hits.

Michelle Weinraub, Cherry Creek’s chief health officer, said the district’s free counseling program grew out of a mental health task force launched in early 2022. She recalled asking students at one meeting if they’d use free counseling sessions they could access on their phones after school or work.

A couple of them were so excited, they jumped out of their chairs, she said.

“They were like, ‘Yes, that’s what we want,’” she said. Then the students started talking: “We can’t get an appointment unless we’re in crisis … My friend tried to call and they’re on a waitlist for six months. My friend wanted to see this person that they knew somebody else was seeing, but it doesn’t accept insurance.”

Experts declare a mental health emergency

In May 2021, just over a year into the pandemic, leaders at Children’s Hospital Colorado sounded the alarm about the spike in serious mental health problems among children and teens, declaring a youth mental health “state of emergency.”

They pleaded for more funding as well as efforts to reduce bureaucratic constraints in the youth mental health system. Six months later the state launched I Matter.

The program isn’t meant to be the only “front door” to counseling, but rather to serve as one low-barrier option for any young person who needs someone to talk to, said Charlotte Whitney of the state’s Behavioral Health Administration, which runs I Matter. There’s no requirement to be extremely anxious or depressed.

Whitney said the model can help set kids up for improved mental health long term “because they know where to access services and they know the coping skills to get them through those really hard times.”

Students 12 and over can sign up for the therapy sessions by filling out a simple online form. Children under 12 can use the service, but need a parent to do so. Whitney said generally students can get telehealth appointments within days.

Occasionally, she said, students wait longer if they’re looking for something specific — for example an in-person appointment in a rural community or a therapist that specializes in transgender issues.

In Aurora, about 230 students have been referred for counseling through the free Hazel Health program since the start of the school year. In Cherry Creek, which launched its program Dec. 5, about 200 students have been referred for help, often by their parents. Officials in both districts say there are no waiting lists for appointments.

Puppy therapy helps students open up

Timothy Swanson, a social worker in Colorado Springs, is one of about 200 I Matter therapists statewide. He sees up to three students a week, mostly in person, through the program. Often, his clients open up first to his dog Smoke, a gentle pitbull mix who accompanies him to the office.

“They just love him. They just grab him and start talking to him,” said Swanson. “It really helps these kids because a lot of times they come in, they’re withdrawn, a little nervous, not sure what therapy’s about.”

Swanson, 63, said many young clients, whether they’ve come through I Matter or other avenues, struggle with anxiety, anger, or depression. Sometimes, it’s because of pandemic-related disruptions at school, the trickle-down effect of parent stress, or cruel behavior from classmates.

Some of his clients have been told by fellow students, “Well, if you feel that way, why don’t you just kill yourself?”

“It’s really damaging,” Swanson said. “I encourage them to talk to counselors, to me, to their parents, to teachers or whoever, to help them develop a support system … a healthy one where they can get good answers.”

As with other free therapy programs, I Matter aims to connect youth to continued counseling if they want or need it after the free sessions. Swanson said 30% to 40% of his I Matter clients continue seeing him after the first six sessions, paying through health insurance or other means.

Weinraub, of the Cherry Creek district, said if needed, Hazel Health therapists work with students and families to connect them to a local therapist after the free telehealth sessions end.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to student burnout

Even before Roxana moved to the United State from Mexico at age 7, she was a top student. Her parents expected good grades and she delivered.

But her classes got harder in middle school. Then, in seventh grade, the pandemic hit. Roxana, once surrounded by friends, found herself spending long days alone in her bedroom.

Her father would say, “You have to come out and at least eat something, drink some water,” Roxana said. “I started getting to the point where I was drowning myself in all my work.”

She felt claustrophobic, exhausted, and worried about her mother, who worked as a nurse in Mexico. Eventually, Roxana tried counseling but it didn’t go well. She said the therapist told her, “It’s only in your head. You’re just pretending.”

By the middle of her freshman year in high school, her struggles spiraled. She was skipping classes and nearly failing courses for the first time in her life. She ended up in the hospital.

Today, Roxana is doing better. She’s seeing a therapist she relates to — one who is Latina and a native Spanish-speaker like herself — and she’s let go of her drive for perfect grades. She’s also trying to tackle the stigma around seeking mental health help, something she’s felt as part of the Latino community.

“We have this big, big culture of what happens in our family stays in our family and you’re not going to tell our family business around,” she said.

But Roxana knows there are other students like her at school, silently struggling with their painful realities. That’s why she decided to say something during the recent civics class, stuttering a bit as she shared her story.

“If I don’t speak out, other people won’t either,” she said.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Resources:
I Matter: Sign up for six free therapy sessions for Colorado youth.
Colorado Crisis Line: 1-844-493-8255 or text TALK to 38255.
National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Dial 988.

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By John Herrick, Boulder Reporting Lab (AP Storyshare)

Two months before the use of methamphetamines shut down the library last month, the City and County of Boulder started implementing a program to help people wean off the highly addictive stimulant that has communities scrambling for solutions. The relatively cheap and readily available drug contributes to homelessness, overdose deaths and incarceration rates.

In October 2022, Boulder County repurposed one of its office buildings to provide temporary out-patient drug addiction treatment, including for people who are addicted to methamphetamine.

The addiction treatment center off Broadway is run by Tribe Recovery Homes Inc., a Denver-based organization that mostly manages sober living homes.

According to county officials, about 12 people are visiting the center for clinical and therapeutic services and peer support.

The addiction recovery work is paid for through a $900,000 grant the county won in 2021 from the U.S. Department of Justice. While medication is often used to ease cravings to opioids, the most common treatment for people addicted to methamphetamine is behavioral therapy.

The county’s out-patient treatment center was set up as a temporary solution while the City of Boulder found a property it could buy and use for inpatient treatment. Tribe would still provide the services. City of Boulder officials said this week they are in the process of closing a deal on a home. If all goes as planned, the recovery home could be up and running in a matter of months.

“It takes time for folks to get stable,” Jim Adams-Berger, the strategic initiatives division manager for Boulder County’s Community Services Department, told Boulder Reporting Lab. “That happens best in some kind of inpatient, supportive recovery home-type environment.”

The city is planning to use money from its Affordable Housing Fund to pay for the home. The county, meanwhile, has also committed $600,000 to help purchase the property. City and county officials preferred not to disclose the location of the home, in part due to concerns about potential opposition from neighbors.

The recovery home will be an incremental step toward addressing methamphetamine addiction in Boulder County. In 2020, the county estimated 535 people who passed through the Boulder County Jail were addicted to methamphetamine, according to its grant proposal. (There are currently 412 people incarcerated or detained in the jail, according to state data.)

Ultimately, the county wants to have at least three, three-bedroom homes providing recovery services, according to its grant proposal. The residents would live in the home for two to three months. Over three years, the program aims to serve 207 people. This does not include the out-patient center on Broadway.

After residents leave the home, Tribe clinicians will monitor their progress, according to the county.

“They are one of the few service providers that are not afraid of methamphetamine addiction or polysubstance addiction,” Heidi Grove, the systems manager for Homeless Solutions Boulder County, told Boulder Reporting Lab, referring to Tribe. “Something that we really wanted to bring into the county is somebody who’s not afraid to tackle some really challenging substance addictions.”

The county aims to serve people who have been involved in the criminal legal system, and clients will likely be referred to the program by law enforcement. The county has said the program will include support with housing, employment, public benefits, transportation, identification cards, childcare and other services. All of these services make it easier to kick a drug addition, according to Tribe.

“When you’re in a single-family home that’s in a neighborhood, there’s public transportation. You have an opportunity to get your license back, you have an opportunity to engage with your family again…and get yourself all together,” Thomas Hernandez, the founder of Tribe, said.

City and county officials had anticipated getting the residential treatment program up and running last summer. But the process of finding and purchasing a property caused delays.

This was anticipated. In its grant proposal, the county cited the “high cost and limited availability of affordable housing” and “significant resistance” from residents to homeless shelters and supportive housing.

Kurt Firnhaber, the city’s director of Housing and Human Services, is working to close the deal on one of the properties. “We are currently working through some issues related to the property where we are planning to host this service,” Firnahber said in a recent email. He said he was not available for an interview.

If the city is able to purchase a home, county officials anticipate the residential treatment program will begin accepting people in the coming months.

“We have the resources,” Adams-Berger said. “But the hurdle really is finding a place.”

The issue of methamphetamine addiction received renewed attention in recent weeks after the Boulder library closure. The cleanup work, estimated to cost $125,000, is just one example of the far-reaching impacts of methamphetamine addiction on the broader community.

Before the library’s closure, the city and county officials wanted to invest in residential treatment as a means of reducing homelessness. Landlords often refuse to sign leases with people who have a history of methamphetamine use, due to concerns over contamination.

Several rental properties across the city, including those owned by Boulder Housing Partners, the city’s largest recipient of the city’s affordable housing dollars, have been contaminated with methamphetamine, according to state records. This is one of the reasons why the city and the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless, a nonprofit that runs the city’s largest homeless shelter, are buying properties to turn into affordable housing. Adams-Berger said the county is creating a pot of money to help property owners pay for the cost of remediation.

Henry Larson provided reporting for this story.

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By Eric Galatas, Public News Service (AP Storyshare)

Colorado saw the number of children without health insurance drop significantly between 2019 and 2021, according to a new report from Georgetown University.

This reverses a trend from the previous two years.

But Erin Miller – vice president for health initiatives for the Colorado Children’s Campaign – points to state data showing that more than 200,000 children are at risk of losing coverage, when the COVID public health emergency expires.

She said families losing coverage could face major financial risks, including medical debt and bankruptcy.

“Folks are worried that they are not going to be able to afford their kid’s glasses if they don’t have Medicaid or CHIP coverage,” said Miller. “Or they’re worried about going to the pharmacy one day to refill their kid’s asthma medication and finding out they don’t have insurance any more.”

Loss of coverage is largely due to the return of administrative burdens that were lifted at the onset of the pandemic.

As soon as next April, families eligible for insurance through the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan, or CHIP, and Medicaid will no longer keep their coverage.

They will have to go through a complicated and lengthy application process.

The Georgetown report warns that nationally, 6.7 million children could lose coverage when the pandemic is declared over.

Report lead author Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families, said three out of every four children who may lose insurance through Medicaid will still be eligible for coverage.

“Sometimes children lose coverage in normal times at Medicaid renewal, just because the letter gets lost in the mail,” said Alker. “Families with limited English proficiency may have more trouble getting through the renewal process successfully.”

When families have insurance, Miller said maternal and child mortality rates go down – and kids are more likely to graduate from high school and college, and have higher income as adults.

She said the continuous coverage protections established during the pandemic, which kept families enrolled without all the red tape, shows it’s possible to ensure kids get the health care they need.

“Government policy makes a huge difference in the lives of people and in families,” said Miller. “One silver lining of the pandemic is that if you say that folks need to stay enrolled in their coverage at the state level, they do.”

The post More Than 200,000 Colorado Kids Could Lose Health Coverage, Experts Warn appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Complaints about safety and quality of care in West Springs Hospital’s adolescent unit have prompted state regulators to shut part of the facility and withhold authorization for Medicaid patients until concerns are investigated. (Photo by Dean Humphrey, COLab)

By Susan Greene, Colorado News Collaborative (via AP Storyshare)

Colorado’s new Behavioral Health Administration shut down part of the Western Slope’s only psychiatric hospital on Wednesday in response to complaints about the quality and safety of the care it gives teenagers and kids as young as seven.

Also Wednesday, the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing said it will withhold payment for any new Medicaid inpatients until investigators complete a review of safety concerns at West Springs Hospital in Grand Junction. That means Medicaid recipients on the Western Slope in need of psychiatric hospitalization will, at least for a few months, have to seek it in Denver, Salt Lake City or even farther.

West Springs is an arm of Mind Springs Health, the long-troubled mental health safety-net provider contracted with the state to serve residents of 10 Western Slope counties.

The Behavioral Health Administration’s cease and desist letter, served late Wednesday morning, ordered West Springs to stop using an old building north of and across a short walkway from its new hospital to house and treat inpatients. The order says two young patients escaped from Building D in early September – but fails to note they returned voluntarily within an hour. State investigators found patients still housed there as of Friday. The order also says the building contained unsecured cords and sharp plastic objects patients could use to harm themselves or others. Whether any patients did so is unclear as of this writing.

Mind Springs’ spokeswoman, Stephanie Keister, declined to answer questions about the order Wednesday. Her bosses had said Tuesday evening that about eight of the estimated 30 and 40 psychiatric patients hospitalized at West Springs were children and teens.

Wednesday’s cease and desist order comes 12 days after Mind Springs fired Dr. Frank James, a psychiatrist who had been serving as its latest chief medical officer, for what its employment lawyer described as “rude, insolent, harassing and offensive behavior toward fellow employees.” Two days later, sources in state government say, James filed a complaint with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment alleging West Springs has been compromising the quality and safety of care for inpatients who are teenagers and children.

State officials will not make the complaint or at least one other they allude to public or release details about them until three separate agencies investigate the allegations. And James, for his part, has not responded to three requests for comment this week.

Chelsea Arata, who worked for about six years as a psychiatric nurse practitioner treating young inpatients at West Springs and young outpatients at Mind Springs, says James effectively put her in charge of West Springs’ adolescent unit earlier this month. She believes at least one of the complaints to the state echos concerns she recently raised in meetings and emails asking for clarity and support about issues such as:

• Whether to admit children as young as seven years old to a psychiatric unit whose treatment programs, Arata says, are designed for teenagers. West Springs’ age-limit policy has often fluctuated, and recently prohibited admitting patients under 12.
• Housing younger children with sometimes violent or predatory patients 10 years their senior.
• Treating children with methods inappropriate for their age and conditions.
• The absence of clear protocols to protect patients from other patients’ violent outbursts – including an incident earlier this month when one teenager punched another in the face.
• Ambiguous protocols on how, if at all, to physically restrain young patients posing serious safety threats.
• Inconsistent policies on whether young patients segregated from others in the adolescent unit require constant, arm’s length supervision by a hospital staffer – including in the bathroom and shower – despite the risk of retraumatizing them.

Mind Springs fired Arata last Friday, she says in retaliation for the care quality and safety questions she was raising about young patients’ care. Her wife, nurse practitioner Raelynn Hilgenfeld, was escorted out of Mind Springs’ residential program earlier this year after blowing the whistle about potentially lethal prescription problems in its addiction program.

For his part, Mind Springs CEO John Sheehan said late Tuesday that West Springs is licensed to treat youth as young as age seven. He said he has never spoken with Arata and is not familiar with any concerns she raised about problems in the adolescent unit.

“I don’t believe there is any evidence that she was retaliated against in any way,” he added about her firing.

Rather, Sheehan said Arata “was terminated for directing a (nurse) on the unit to agitate a child so that child could be restrained and moved to another part of the unit” and then being “untruthful” about it. Mind Springs Chief Operating Officer Elizabeth Tice added that Arata failed to file “critical incident reports” about that teenager’s violent outbursts, as all Mind Springs employees have been instructed to do.

Arata countered there’s no evidence suggesting that such provocation actually happened and said administrators twisted the meaning of her comments about the patient and failed to give her and her colleagues clear, updated policies about how to handle violence by patients, including a 16-year-old recently punched in the face.

Since her firing on Friday, she said, “I have nightmares every night about my patients. I love these kids. I’ve been taking care of them for years. I don’t know what’s happening with them and I never will. I feel like a conspiracy theorist as I’m sitting here realizing …how they shape the narrative to justify firing me for” bringing problems to light.

Mind Springs Health is contracted with the state to serve people who are indigent, on Medicaid, or facing mental health or addiction crises in a 23,000-square mile area in Eagle, Garfield, Grand, Jackson, Mesa, Moffat, Pitkin, Rio Blanco, Routt, and Summit counties. It has 13 outpatient offices throughout the 10-county region in addition to West Springs hospital in Grand Junction.

The organization’s outpatient care has been the subject of numerous complaints from residents in those counties about everything from misdiagnoses, misprescribing, and having to wait as long as 11 months to see a psychiatrist. It also has been the subject of frustration among some county officials who haven’t been able to glean answers from Mind Springs or the state about why some services the organization has claimed to offer haven’t actually been available to the public.

Sheehan started running Mind Springs in August after his longtime predecessor, Sharon Raggio, resigned last winter following an investigation by the Colorado News Collaborative (COLab), a nonprofit involving more than 160 Colorado news outlets. That investigation exposed longstanding problems with Mind Springs: quality and safety of care, access to care, and lack of transparency in how it spends tens of millions of state and federal tax dollars. That news report was part of a broader investigation into flaws – some of them fatal – within Colorado’s statewide mental health safety net system and state regulators’ inaction about them.

COLab has since exposed allegations by several former Mind Springs employees that the organization had them falsify thousands of patient records in an effort to make its treatment programs seem more effective and secure funding from the state. Those fraud allegations are currently under investigation by Rocky Mountain Health Plans, which contracts with the state to administer Medicaid funding to Mind Springs, among other safety-net providers.

With its news partners at the Colorado Springs Gazette and Denver Gazette, COLab also exposed a pattern of “life-threatening prescription errors.” A review found that in a sampling of 58 outpatient clients who were prescribed high doses of the tranquilizer benzodiazepine between February 2020 and February 2021, there were concerns about the quality of care given to 52, and 28 (48%) received care so poor they faced “severe, life-threatening impact.” State officials kept those findings secret despite mounting public concerns about Mind Springs. Sheehan has said his organization has addressed the problem.

Responsibility to regulate Mind Springs and Colorado’s 17 other tax-funded community mental health centers is split between three state departments: the Department of Health Care Policy & Financing (HCPF), which doles out Medicaid funding, the Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), which controls the centers’ licensing, and the Behavioral Health Administration (BHA), which launched in July as a cabinet-level agency that, generally speaking, has replaced the Office of Behavioral Health in contracting with and setting care standards for community mental health centers.

Dr. Morgan Medlock, an emergency psychiatrist and addiction medicine specialist who runs the BHA, has promised “vast reforms” to Colorado’s mental health safety-net system, including far greater transparency and accountability. Her agency touts Wednesday’s cease and desist as an example of its commitment to “lead boldly,” even though Mind Springs already had addressed safety problems earlier this month by moving the adolescent unit out of Building D.

Mind Springs CEO Sheehan has since his hiring two months ago acknowledged long standing problems at Mind Springs. He said late Tuesday the organization has, under his leadership, been “improving every day.”

Colorado News Collaborative reporter Susan Greene can be reached confidentially at susan@colabnews.co.

This story is brought to you by COLab, the Colorado News Collaborative, a nonprofit coalition of more than 170 newsrooms across Colorado working together to better serve the public. Learn more at https://colabnews.co

The post On Edge: Concerns about kids’ safety at Grand Junction psych hospital prompt state actions appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

By Amanda Horvath, Rocky Mountain PBS (via AP Storyshare)

DENVER — “Getting back up, that’s the hardest part.”

Kate Pitones is part of the generation experiencing one of the greatest mental health crises ever in Colorado. She recently started her sophomore year of high school at Kunsmiller Creative Arts Academy in Denver. At 15 years old she has lived through unprecedented times as a teenager and sometimes struggles with her mental health.

“It’s okay for it to weigh you down. You just can’t let it stop you completely,” she told Rocky Mountain PBS when speaking about what she has learned about mental health care in the last few years. And she is not alone in her struggles.

“We have been experiencing chronic stress across society for the last almost three years now, and chronic stress has a real significant impact and a long standing impact on our mental health over time,” said Jessica Hawks, Ph.D., a clinical child and adolescent psychologist and the clinical director of the Pediatric Mental Health Institute at Children’s Hospital Colorado.

Jessica Hawks, Ph.D., clinical child and adolescent psychologist and clinical director of the Pediatric Mental Health Institute at Children’s Hospital Colorado.

Hawks and other mental health professionals around Colorado are waiving the red flag, saying the state of youth mental health is still getting worse, not better.

“[It’s] pretty alarming,” she said. “Since the beginning of the pandemic to now, we’ve seen a doubling … in the rates of mental health concerns for youth.”

Children’s Hospital Colorado first sounded the alarm in May of 2021 declaring a “state of emergency” for youth mental health. The goal was to really capture the attention of Coloradans and policy makers and communicate the true severity of what kids were going through.

[Related: Colorado doctors say kids’ mental health is in a “state of emergency” during the pandemic]

Comparing numbers from the beginning of 2019 to the beginning of 2022, Children’s Hospital saw a 103% increase in the number of patients who arrived in a crisis. In just the last year, the hospital saw a 23% increase of patients in crisis. While these numbers are alarming, Hawks said the there is another statistic that worries her more.

Children’s Hospital Colorado reports from 2019 to 2022 youth patients in a mental health crisis doubled.

“Only about 22% of youth in the state of Colorado that need mental health services because of the significance of their mental health concerns are actually receiving the treatment that they need,” said Hawks.

For Pitones those numbers track in her world.

“There’s at least one or two people in a friend group that … they have some type of depression or anxiety or, like, at least a plan of suicide,” said Pitones.

She has faced some mental health challenges of her own, which started when she was having trouble with physical health. She was dealing with chronic back pain at a young age with a family history of arthritis hitting at the same time as a growth spurt.

“So I had to go to Children’s Hospital to get some … physical therapy. And I also had a therapist to talk to there. So it’s just like, ‘Why is your mental health declining?’ Because I can’t do this. I can’t, you know, play my regular sports. I cannot play volleyball or soccer anymore because everything hurts,” Pitones explained to her therapist.

She said through the work with her therapist, Pitones realized how to change that mindset of “I can’t” to be less restrictive and celebrate what she can still do.

“I feel more energized to, like, actually get outside and try something even though I know it’s going to hurt, but it’s going to make me better,” said Pitones.

Outside of her personal journey, this school year she is working on a project to help her peers. Pitones is on the Youth Action Board with Children’s Hospital Colorado mental health institute. This board consists of nearly 20 teens across the Denver-metro area who are interested in raising awareness and de-stigmatizing mental health issues.

Pitones became involved last year and helped come up with plans to build a “wellness room” inside her school.

Kate Pitones is helping to build a wellness room for her fellow classmates at Kunsmiller Creative Arts Academy.

“It’s like a decompression space where, like, students can go in and … just relax and take a break,” said Pitones, “because school day is pretty long.”

The wellness room will be built in a space in the school’s library and include items like bean bag chairs and sound proof headphones. The hope is it becomes a place to take a break and keep students from completely breaking down.

“As best as you can try to get through the day without, like, having the idea of ‘Oh, my God, I’m so overwhelmed. I don’t think I’m going to make it through this day because I’m going to have, like, a mental breakdown,’” Pitones explained.

This wellness room won’t be up and running until late October or November because they weren’t able to work on it this summer. However, Pitones is excited for students to use it and has heard they are eagerly waiting for it be open.

“The point is you can decompress and go back into class with a better mindset and not just ditch the entire class and get a failing grade for the day in that class,” she said.

For the beginning of the school year, especially this year, kids will have to deal with an increasing amount of stress in other ways.

“We consistently see increases in mental health concerns at this point in the school year, and that’s because the return to school is just inherently stressful for everybody. There’s going to be more academic pressures. You’re around your peer group, which can be a good or bad thing depending on the situation,” Hawks explained.

The other hurdle students will face this year is increasing expectations to “return to normal” when so much growth and development was missed. Outside of academic setbacks, especially depending on age, students missed out on socialization and the structure of in-person learning.

[Related: CMAS results: Colorado students make gains but still below pre-pandemic levels]

“If you think about the young kids in school for second, third grade — their first couple of years in grade school was completely unlike anything any of us have ever experienced. So, they’re actually reentering school almost for the first time,” said Hawks.

While stopping stressors isn’t always achievable, Hawks emphasized youth and parents there are actionable things they can do to truly make a difference and even save a life.

Kate Pitones, 15, leaned on her brother for support through the isolating part of the pandemic. As she returns to school this year, she is working on a project to help all students maintain mental well-being.

One of the most important things that youth should remember when they’re going back to school is to get back to the basics. It’s amazing what a difference all the basic health, hygiene sorts of things can have on our mental health,” said Hawks. “The number one thing that adults can do to support their kids is to check in with them regularly and spend quality time together.”

In her work, Hawks said she often works with parents and their children in tandem on how to improve mental health and develop healthy coping skills. She said it’s common for parents to feel guilt over their child’s depression, anxiety or mental illness. She encourages parents to not focus on the guilt but on how they can help moving forward.

“The really great thing about youth is that they are profoundly, positively impacted by the adults in their life,” said Hawks. “Pay attention to your kid, and ask them, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ And actually listen to what they’re saying and then figure out a plan. If your child is struggling, get them the support that they need.”

For Pitones, she wants to tell kids to watch out for themselves and each other and know help is out there. She shared a story of when a friend was showing signs of concerning behavior — ditching class, not eating, hanging out with “the bad crowd” as she put it. Pitones and her friends talked to this girl and found out she had plans to harm herself. That’s when they made the hard decision to tell a teacher.

“[They] had her pulled into the school counselor’s office, and it was kind of a scary moment because it was, like, ‘Is she going to be mad at us for getting her that help?’” Pitones explained. “No, she was very relieved with us for us doing that.”

Pitones said that friend was able to find a therapist and just spoke to her recently. She is doing well and happily welcomed a new puppy with her family.

Recent years have taught Pitones a lot about mental health, but most importantly the power of talking about the struggles and helping to take away the stigma of asking for help.

“At least talking about it or making it known … that you’re there for them, that’s a very big help,” said Pitones. “[They’re] not going to be as afraid to reach out.”

The post A break before a breakdown: Denver student hopes wellness room soothes youth mental health crisis appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published by Sentinel Colorado and was shared via AP StoryShare. It was written by Kara Mason, a Sentinel Staff Writer. 

By Kara Mason, Sentinel Colorado

Aimée Stahel climbed more than a dozen 14,000-feet peaks last summer, just months before she was diagnosed with one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer that, if detected even just six more months later, could have been a death sentence.

She didn’t feel any lumps in her chest. In fact, she said she felt great. It was her dedication to her annual mammogram that likely saved 49-year-old Stahel’s life. Doctors fear, however, that others who don’t take cancer screenings and routine medical exams as seriously as Stahel did could be rolling the dice on their lives.

Cancer screenings are down 8% year over year at the Medical Center of Aurora, according to hospital statistics. Health officials say the pandemic is still playing a part in patients putting off routine health care.

Last summer, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that its National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program declined by 87% for breast cancer and 84% for cervical cancer during April 2020 as compared with the previous 5-year averages for that month. By June 2020, screening numbers in the program started to rebound, but nationwide, they’re not where they were before COVID-19 shuttered non-emergency health clinics for weeks at the onset of the pandemic.

A mammography machine at The Medical Center of Aurora. A sharp decline has been seen in routine health check-ups since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo by PHILIP B. POSTON/Sentinel Colorado

Overall, researchers from the American Cancer Society estimate that millions of Americans have missed cancer screenings and other preventive care because of pandemic disruptions.

“Many people caught up on screenings later in 2020, but overall, the COVID-19 pandemic kept screenings down over the course of the entire year,” said ACS researcher Ahmedin Jeman in a statement earlier this month. “As we move forward, it’s crucial to get people back into their doctor’s offices to get screened.”

Low-income women and women of color saw some of the sharpest declines in routine breast and cervical cancer screenings. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment helped nearly 12,000 uninsured or under-insured women across the state access cancer screenings from July 2018 to June 2019, said Emily Kinsella, who manages the Women’s Wellness Connection.

“Things were actually going pretty well in 2020 until the pandemic,” she said. From March 2020 on, the program, which works with health clinics across Colorado to help connect women without insurance to free confidential breast and cervical cancer screenings, saw a few thousand fewer women.

When the fiscal year ends on June 30, it’s not likely Kinsella’s program will have reached as many women as it did in 2019. As of mid-May, the program was at 9,936 cancer screenings.

“We are focusing on the populations that don’t have access to screenings. So they’re uninsured, they don’t have Medicaid, they don’t have insurance, they’re in that gap. We’re also focusing on those populations that are less likely to be screened, or more likely to have poor outcomes. So they have lower screening rates, or maybe they have higher late stage diagnosis (rate), higher mortality rates, things like that,” she said.

“We’re focusing on that group to try to reduce the inequities in outcomes for breast and cervical cancer, as well as reduce the cost…When it’s cheaper, it’s easier.”

Most of that outreach effort to get those Coloradans screened for cancer happens in-person, so community health navigators had to get creative about connecting with people over the last few years. They handed out flyers during vaccination clinics and used yard signs to try and nudge people to seek out screenings.

Those navigators, however, are in short supply, said Colorado Cancer Coalition Executive Director Christi Cahill. Because they’re not reimbursable expenses in the industry, they’re often not a priority, though they play a vital role in connecting people, especially those in need, to care that can become more costly down the line.

The message is clear: don’t wait

Skipping a yearly mammogram or other cancer screenings off even just a few months could have serious consequences, doctors warn. Stahel was diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma in January.

In March, she opted for a double mastectomy and reconstruction surgery at the Medical Center of Aurora, saving her from more than a year’s worth of chemotherapy treatments. It’s unlikely that would have been the case had she put off her screening.

“Talk about cancer not discriminating,” Stahel said from her Denver home earlier this month, a day before she planned to move to North Carolina with her husband, who received a job promotion the same week as her diagnosis. “It doesn’t matter how healthy you are, how active you are. You have no choice. So you fight it and you get support, and you find the best team that’s the right fit for you. And you move forward fast.”

Nine weeks after surgery, Stahel was running a half-marathon with her husband.

“I decided this wasn’t going to dominate my life,” she said.

Stahel had no family history of breast cancer. She didn’t even know anybody who had it until she got the call about her diagnosis in January. “I thought they had the wrong patient at first,” she said.

But breast cancer can happen quickly.

“I don’t think people quite understand that breast cancer can easily arise within a year. So it’s really important to not take any time off,” said Dr. Kimberly Wright, a breast radiologist with HealthONE Breast Care at The Medical Center of Aurora. “They should be coming every single year. The risk of missing an early stage cancer can have really detrimental effects and can significantly affect their prognosis.”

Making the time saves lives

Dr. Ned Sharpless, director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, estimates there could be nearly 10,000 excess deaths over the next decade because of delayed detection and treatment of breast and colon cancers. Postponing care “was prudent at one time” because of the risks of COVID-19 exposure, but deferring for too long “may turn one public health crisis into many others,” he wrote in the journal Science.

Wright and others say health care clinics are a relatively safe environment now. Providers wear masks and have taken other measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Based on what’s known about breast cancer deaths from past years in the United States, about 10% “could have been prevented if women were getting routine screening,” but 20% to 25% could have been prevented with appropriate treatment, said Dr. Otis Brawley, a Johns Hopkins University professor and former chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

“That’s not to say screening is not important, but many people think that cancer screening saves more lives than it actually does,” Brawley said.

A short-term delay may not hurt mortality much if screening resumes quickly, as it needs to do, he said.

Kinsella, with the state health department, said she expects to see a difference in more severe cancer diagnoses throughout the state because of delayed screenings, though she and other health care experts aren’t positive when data will start to show that.

A short-term delay may not hurt mortality much if screening resumes quickly, as it needs to do, he said.

Typically, Wright sees more patients in the fall, when Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October pushes more people in to get mammograms, but she said she wishes there were more reminders all year long.

“It definitely should not be limited to once a year, I mean, quarterly if at a minimum, I would think,” she said. “We do see a significant rise in the number of women coming into their mammograms in October, so obviously the awareness month works. It gets the message out and gets women coming in. I just wish it wasn’t so infrequent.”

After Stahel’s diagnosis, a flood of her friends sought out cancer screenings. Some who had skipped multiple years of mammograms were suddenly making appointments.

“We really can catch it early, if we can do our due diligence,” Stahel said. “Just sacrifice 10 minutes. I know it’s annoying. We all hate that machine. But after 10 minutes, it could literally save your life.”

— THE ASSOCIATED PRESS contributed to this report

The post Dangerous deferral: Cancer screenings still down in Colorado, prompting concerns among health experts appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), vice chairman of the Committee, released the following statements on introduction of their bipartisan Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022 (VAWA) in the Senate.

“Nearly a decade ago, the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 restored Tribal jurisdiction over domestic violence crimes, recognizing Tribes’ right to exercise their authority and giving them resources to go after criminals,” said Chairman Schatz. “Today’s introduction makes clear the Senate is serious about strengthening this important law, protecting Native women, children, and families, and restoring justice for Native communities. I am proud of the contributions Committee members made to strengthening the Tribal title and grateful for my bipartisan partnership with Vice Chairman Murkowski. I look forward to seeing this legislation passed into law.”

The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022 reflects years of input on public safety from stakeholders in all Tribal, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities and will increase access to federal resources and data for Native communities. The bipartisan bill contains a Tribal title based on a Committee discussion draft Schatz and Murkowski released in December, which —

• Maintains US tribal jurisdiction over crimes of dating violence, domestic violence, and violations of tribal civil protection orders first put in place by the 2013 VAWA reauthorization;
• Restores US tribal jurisdiction over crimes of child violence, sexual violence, sex trafficking, stalking, obstruction of justice, and assault of Tribal justice personnel committed by non-Indians offenders
• Ensures all recognized tribes in the US, including Alaska and Maine, can exercise these same important jurisdictional tools to keep their communities safe; and
• Provides US tribes with improved access to critical VAWA implementation resources by: increasing authorization level of the VAWA Special Tribal Criminal Jurisdiction (STCJ) implementation grant program, expanding the VAWA STCJ implementation grant program to cover Tribes’  reimbursements costs, reestablishing the Bureau of Prisons Tribal Prisoner Program, and codifying the US Department of Justice’s Tribal Access Program to provide all US tribes with access to national criminal information databases.

The post Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022 (VAWA) Introduced appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

The Boulder County District Attorney’s Office prioritizes the safety and well-being of victims of intimate partner violence, and specifically, teen survivors of domestic violence. This month, the District Attorney’s Office wants to highlight this important issue and provide information about how to recognize and respond to teen dating violence. Intimate partner violence is a public health crisis and the young adults in our community are not immune from its devastating effects. 

The Center for Disease Control reports that nearly 1 in 11 female high school students and 1 in 14 male students report having experienced physical dating violence in 2020. In addition to physical violence, our youth in dating relationships may be victimized by sexual violence, psychological manipulation and control, or be the target of stalking behavior. The effects of this abuse shape our youths’ perceptions of themselves, the choices they make, and the relationships they later pursue. It is imperative that our community remains vigilant about spotting and acting upon the warning signs of abuse.  

Physical abuse is often accompanied by other forms of coercion and control by an intimate partner. Examples of coercive, controlling behavior may include extreme expressions of jealousy, isolating or “cutting off” a victim from their friends and family, monitoring a victim’s social media accounts and online activity, following a victim or showing up unexpectedly at social activities, and using demeaning and hurtful language followed an outpouring of love and affection.  Offenders will often use threats of suicide, self-harm, or harm to a victim to convince a victim to stay in an unhealthy relationship.

A victim, especially a teen victim, may interpret this coercive, controlling behavior as flattering or evidence of their partner’s devotion or commitment to them. Alternatively, a victim may experience this behavior as threatening and scary. Both interpretations of an offender’s coercive, controlling conduct often leads a victim to decide not to talk about what is really going on in the relationship and possibly even to actively try to prevent others from learning what is actually going on.

In addition to the physical signs of abuse like unexplained bruising or other injuries, victims may display signs of depression or anxiety. Victims may spend less time with friends or family members. Victims may also become anxious and urgent about communicating with their partner above other priorities. Victims could be reluctant to talk about the relationship or may find ways to justify or minimize the unhealthy behavior.

Boulder County has a wide range of excellent resources available to victims of domestic violence and their loved ones. The District Attorney’s Office prioritizes the investigation and prosecution of domestic violence offenders and the safety of victims of intimate partner violence. Please reach out to our office or the community resources listed below for information and assistance.

Resources:

• Blue Sky Bridge: 303-444-1388,
• National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233
• Moving to End Sexual Assault (MESA): 303-443-7300
• Safe Shelter of St. Vrain Valley: 303-772-4422
• Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence (SPAN): 303-444-2424
• Colorado Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline: 1-844-CO-4-KIDS (264-5437)
• CU Boulder Office of Victim Assistance: 303-492-8855

The post February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

FREE KN95 AND MEDICAL GRADE MASKS – In support of the State of Colorado’s ongoing efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and assist in the mitigation of virus spread, free KN95 medical grade masks can be picked up at certain public libraries and other community sites across the state that have agreed to be local redistribution points. Masks can be picked up (5 per person) at locations.

FREE VACCINATION – You can get a COVID-19 vaccine or booster at a pharmacy, doctor’s office, pop-up clinic, or mobile vaccine bus near you. The COVID-19 vaccine is free. You don’t need ID or insurance to get vaccinated. Many providers take walk-ins and same-day appointments. You are entitled to paid time off from your job to get vaccinated and recover from any side effects. Click here for vaccination sites.

FREE AND FAST COVID TEST – It’s easy to get a free, fast, and safe COVID-19 test with more than 150 free community testing sites across Colorado. If you’re experiencing symptoms or have been exposed to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19, make an appointment today — neither insurance nor ID is required to get tested.

COVID-19 THIRD DOSE AVAILABILITY – All Coloradans are eligible for booster doses if they have received both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine and it has been more than 6 months since their second dose. Or if they have received the Johnson and Johnson single-dose vaccine more than two months prior. Click here for more info.

ECONOMIC RECOVERY PROGRAMS 

CLIMBER Loan Fund. Applications are open.

Colorado Loans for Increasing Mainstreet Business and Economic Recovery (CLIMBER) fund provides $250 million to small businesses with working capital loans between $30,000 and $500,000. Below-market interest rates and a 1-year deferred payment option make the program a secure recovery option for small businesses.

Colorado Revolving Loan Fund  Applications are open. This fund provides loans that help small to medium-sized Colorado businesses negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. These loans range from $5,000 to $750,000. The loans are intended to provide startup and working capital that will help create and retain jobs across Colorado.

Business Foundations Technical Assistance Program Applications are open. This program provides $900,000 to support technical assistance for small businesses with 5 or fewer employees.

Meeting and Events Incentive Cash Rebate Applications are open. This program provides $10 million for a 10% cash rebate against eligible hard costs for hosting meetings and events in Colorado that take place on or after July 1, 2021 and on or before December 31, 2022.

Colorado Community Revitalization Grant Applications are open. This program provides $65 million in gap funding for mixed-use projects in creative districts, historic districts, main streets or neighborhood commercial centers.

Colorado Creative Corps ARP Grant Applications are due January 13. This grant provides funding up to $25,000 to individual artists for specific, definable projects that connect artists and organizations to local initiatives.

Rural Jump-Start Zone Grant Applications are open. Businesses that establish new operations in specified Rural Jump-Start and Just Transition communities will be eligible to receive up to $40,000 and up to $5,000 per new hire.

The post Gov’s Guide to COVID Resources appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

DENVER – FEMA has approved more than $237.12 million in additional Public Assistance funding for the COVID-19 response in Colorado. The assistance was made available under a major disaster declaration issued March 28, 2020. FEMA has provided more than $1.8 billion in total assistance for Colorado’s COVID-19 response to date.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment was awarded $237.12 million in FEMA funding to create and operate seven community-based testing sites to conduct statewide COVID-19 testing. Since September 2021, an average of more than 450,000 tests per month were administered at the sites. The award provides funding for contracted testing and lab services including supplies and equipment, and the transporting and processing of tests.

For the COVID-19 response, FEMA has simplified the Public Assistance application and funding process to address the magnitude of this event and to allow state and local governments to receive eligible funding more quickly. These reimbursements play a critical role as state, tribal and local officials work tirelessly to assist their communities during this response. Additional information about FEMA’s Public Assistance program can be found at www.fema.gov/assistance/public.

The post FEMA Provides $237.12 Million To CO. For COVID Response appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

by Save Our Skies Alliance

Photo: depositphotos

It has been a difficult summer for those who enjoy Colorado’s beautiful outdoors. Front Range air quality deteriorated to “unhealthy” levels at least 18 times this year. That means that the EPA may move parts of the Front Range from the “serious” to “severe” category under their classification of non-attainment areas. All this has been made worse by the lung-damaging haze of wildfire smoke that obscures our blue skies.

Unfortunately, there is another toxin present in our air that few of us know about – LEAD!

Lead was prohibited in paint in 1978, and removed from the gas in our cars in 1996. But there remains a significant source of lead in the skies above us… it is in the aviation gas that smaller, piston engine (propeller) planes use. And, if you live anywhere near a Front Range airport, there is a huge source of this lead dust raining down on your home, schools, playgrounds and open space every day. A just-released study of the impact of lead-based fuels on children living near the Reid-Hillview airport in Santa Clara, CA clearly defines this hidden health risk. 

New Science on Lead in the Air

Results of this comprehensive and controlled 10-year analysis showed blood lead level increases in children living near the airport were similar to those seen in kids affected by the Flint, Michigan water crisis. While those who lived within a half mile of the airport were most affected, the peer-reviewed study showed that children living downwind from the airport had lead blood levels of .40 micrograms per deciliter higher than children living upwind from the airport. For context, lead levels detected during the peak of the Flint water crisis were between .35 and .45 micrograms per deciliter over baseline.

The study also examined levels during times of maximum exposure to air traffic for children within a half-mile of the airport and estimated an increase of .83 micrograms per deciliter at peak times – significantly higher than the levels seen in Flint.

Dr. Sammy Zahran, a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology in the Colorado School of Public Health, and the Mountain Data Group conducted this study. Zahran had previously investigated lead contamination of drinking water supplies in Flint. The Reid-Hillview study is available online at news.sccgov.org.

It turns out that the small size of lead exhaust from piston engine airplanes (13 nm average) has the potential of rapidly penetrating the lung defenses and gaining direct access to the brain through nasal passages (Griffith 2020). By contrast, most lead dibromide particles inhaled in the past from motor vehicle exhaust would have been flushed from the lungs by the mucosal system.

Save Our Skies Alliance (SOS) is a grassroots organization formed to represent citizens who are impacted by the noise, air, and lead pollution from Front Range airports. For more information on lead in the skies and how it may affect you, visit the Save Our Skies Alliance (SOS) website at: saveourskiesalliance.org.

The post Lead In The Sky: A Hidden Health Crisis | Community Corner appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

10/8/2021 Updated to add commentary from a local community member, Kevin Kisich, PhD, (Immunology), 10/9/2021 Updated to reflect referenced article. 

Recently inspired by a social media conversation, we decided to pull some analysis together of the currently reported numbers by case, vaccination rate, and mask requirements.  We compared four counties: Adams, Boulder, Denver & Weld.

While Boulder County is the only county with a mask mandate of these four, and populations vary from County to County, Boulder does have a major university with a large student population and is heavily trafficked by tourists as well.

We will let the numbers tell the story from here.

All data was derived from the CDC and each county’s Health Departments. Per 100k/case numbers are reflected per week as of today. 

For additional comparisons, we have included two countries that have maintained low cases of COVID; Taiwan and New Zealand.

We felt this statement by Kevin Kisich, PhD, (Immunology) a valuable contribution to this report:

“For every life saved, and illness prevented during this fluster cluck pandemic, enormous effort is required. Each public health intervention, such as vaccination, masking, distancing, or avoiding travel contributes. Many people want black/white, yes/no simple answers. “Masks work”, “vaccines don’t work”, for example. Epidemiology and medical science can provide odds, and probabilities. For the impact of masking on COVID transmission rates, I think this is the most comprehensive study so far. The study shows that masks help, but cannot by themselves stop the pandemic. As I noted: each life saved, or illness prevented takes effort. Either people believe their neighbors are worth the effort, or they do not.”
https://www.poverty-action.org/study/impact-mask-distribution-and-promotion-mask-uptake-and-covid-19-bangladesh

New Zealand:

Taiwan:

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

Third Dose of COVID-19 Vaccines for Immunocompromised Individuals are being Administered in Boulder County

All clinics offering Pfizer and/or Moderna in the county can administer the vaccine

Seguido en Español

Boulder County, CO  — Immunocompromised individuals in Boulder County can get their third vaccine dose in all clinics offering Pfizer and/or Moderna in the county. People who have a moderately to severely compromised immune system may benefit from an additional dose of vaccine to ensure they are protected against COVID-19.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommends people whose immune systems are moderately to severely compromised receive an additional dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine at least four weeks (28 days) after their second dose.

It is not recommended that people receive more than three mRNA COVID-19 vaccine doses.

On Aug. 12, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) amended the Emergency Use Authorizations for both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines to allow an additional dose after the first two doses in certain immunocompromised people. The additional dose should be the same vaccine product as the first two doses.

At this time an additional dose of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine has not been authorized for immunocompromised people.

“The additional dose of the vaccine for immunocompromised people will help increase their protection and prevent severe illness, hospitalization and death,” said Indira Gujral, Boulder County Public Health Manager of Communicable Disease & Emergency Management. “This is a great step toward protecting vulnerable people in our community. If you are immunocompromised, go get your third dose today!”

People who are recommended to receive an additional dose include those who have:

• Been receiving active cancer treatment for tumors or cancers of the blood
• Received an organ transplant and are taking medicine to suppress the immune system
• Received a stem cell transplant within the last two years or are taking medicine to suppress the immune system
• Moderate or severe primary immunodeficiency (such as DiGeorge syndrome or Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome)
• Advanced or untreated HIV infection
• Active treatment with high-dose corticosteroids or other drugs that may suppress your immune response.

Additional doses are free, and no ID, insurance or proof of medical history is required to receive one. Individuals may self-report their immunocompromising conditions to vaccine providers.

Boosters for the general population have not been approved by the CDC or FDA.

The CDC has stated booster shots might begin the week of Sept. 20 for all Americans who have had a second dose at least eight months prior. CDC also anticipates booster shots for the J&J (Janssen) vaccine will become available.

To find a COVID-19 vaccine provider in Boulder County, visit www.boco.org/covidvaccines.

For information about additional doses for immunocompromised individuals, call the Boulder County Call Center at 720-776-0822, Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

–BoulderCountyHealth.org–

La Tercera Dosis de Vacunas Contra COVID-19 para Personas Inmunodeprimidas se está Administrando en el Condado de Boulder

Todas las clínicas que ofrecen Pfizer y / o Moderna en el condado pueden administrar la vacuna

Boulder County, CO  — Las personas inmunodeprimidas en el Condado de Boulder pueden recibir su tercera dosis de vacuna en todas las clínicas que ofrecen Pfizer y / o Moderna en el condado. Las personas que tienen un sistema inmunológico comprometido de moderado a grave pueden beneficiarse de una dosis adicional de vacuna para asegurarse de que están protegidas contra COVID-19.

El comité llamado­ Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP, por sus siglas en inglés) de los Centros para el Control y la Prevención de Enfermedades (CDC, por sus siglas en inglés) recomienda que las personas cuyos sistemas inmunitarios están moderadamente comprometidos reciban una dosis adicional de la vacuna de ARNm contra COVID-19 al menos cuatro semanas (28 días) después de su segunda dosis.

No se recomienda que las personas reciban más de tres dosis de la vacuna de ARNm contra COVID-19.

El 12 de agosto de 2021, la Administración de Alimentos y Medicamentos (FDA, por sus siglas en inglés) enmendó las autorizaciones de uso de emergencia para las vacunas Pfizer y Moderna para permitir una dosis adicional después de las dos primeras dosis en ciertas personas inmunodeprimidas. La dosis adicional debe ser el mismo producto de vacuna que las dos primeras dosis.

En este momento, no se ha autorizado una dosis adicional de la vacuna Johnson & Johnson (J&J) para personas inmunodeprimidas.

“La dosis adicional de la vacuna para personas inmunodeprimidas ayudará a aumentar su protección y prevenir enfermedades graves, hospitalización y muerte”, dijo Indira Gujral, Gerente de Manejo de Enfermedades Transmisibles y Emergencias de Salud Pública del Condado de Boulder. “Éste es un gran paso para proteger a las personas vulnerables en nuestra comunidad. Si está inmunodeprimido, ¡obtenga su tercera dosis hoy!”

Las personas a las que se recomienda recibir una dosis adicional incluyen aquellas que:

• Han estado recibiendo tratamiento activo contra el cáncer para tumores o cánceres de la sangre
• Han recibido un trasplante de órgano y está tomando medicamentos para inhibir el sistema inmunológico
• Han recibido un trasplante de células madre en los últimos dos años o están tomando medicamentos para inhibir el sistema inmunológico
• Tienen inmunodeficiencia primaria moderada o grave (como el síndrome de DiGeorge o el síndrome de Wiskott-Aldrich)
• Infección por VIH avanzada o no tratada
• Tratamiento activo con corticosteroides en dosis altas u otros medicamentos que pueden inhibir su respuesta inmunitaria.

La dosis adicional es gratuita y no se requiere identificación, seguro médico ni prueba de historial médico para recibirla. Las personas pueden informar sus condiciones inmunodeprimidas a los proveedores de vacunas ellas mismas.

Los CDC o la FDA no ha aprobado las vacunas de refuerzo para la población general.

Los CDC han declarado que la distribución de vacunas de refuerzo podría comenzar la semana del 20 de septiembre para todos los estadounidenses que hayan recibido una segunda dosis al menos ocho meses antes. Los CDC también anticipan que estarán disponibles las vacunas de refuerzo para la vacuna J&J (Janssen).

Para encontrar un proveedor de la vacuna contra COVID-19 en el Condado de Boulder, visite www.boco.org/covidvacunas.

Para obtener información sobre dosis adicionales para personas inmunodeprimidas, llame al Centro de Llamadas del Condado de Boulder al 720-776-0822, de lunes a viernes, de 9 a.m. a 2 p.m.

–BoulderCountyHealth.org–

The post Third Dose of COVID-19 Vaccines for Immunocompromised Individuals are being Administered in Boulder County | Press Release appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Depositphotos

Have you ever jokingly heard, “that sounds like a you problem?”. Let’s talk about mental health and how a “you problem” can affect both you and me. Things like bullying, negativity, unrealistic expectations, false information and their presence on social media or in real life can be difficult things to deal with, and they can affect your mental health or others around you.

We can choose how we let things affect us and we can decide if it is a problem with “you” or “me” or both. A few skills to practice in these times of mental challenge:

• Pause and try to focus on the positive path forward for ourselves and those around us.
• Consider whether you’re turning someone else’s “you” problem into a “me” problem.
• Search for win-win solutions for everyone.

You are in control of who you are and what you let affect your physical and mental health. Everyday you make choices like wearing a seatbelt, a mask, or sunscreen, or whether you blow cigarette smoke in someone’s face. We do some of these things automatically and other things we think more about. I encourage you to explore this question when you make your next health decision: “Am I making this decision for you, for me, or for us?”

Let’s use our experiences to create positive opportunities and to teach others something healthy. We become who we are and improve our lives from experiences good and bad. Let’s share together a healthier future through good choices for you, me, and us. As an advisor in grad school once told me, “It’s who we are that counts, not just what we do.” This is a good lesson to remember …For Your Life.

Others can’t tell you who you are or that your actions are wrong. We can respect their choices while trying to work towards a more mentally healthy lifestyle together. Next time you see someone make that unhealthy choice, try not to get upset, and ask: Is it me? Is it them? Who will be affected by this decision? And maybe most importantly, who cares? 

Gary Gianetti has an M.S. in Allied Health and holds certifications in health, fitness, and exercise sciences. When he’s not coaching, he enjoys outdoor adventures on foot, rock, wheels, and in the air with his little ones and his wife. He is the founder of Healthy Altitudes…For Your Life.

The post It’s You… Or Wait, Is It Me? appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

PRESS RELEASE: Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

Boulder County COVID testing sites ramp down

Symptomatic community members are still encouraged to get tested even if they have been vaccinated
Seguido en Español

Boulder County, CO – Boulder County Public Health will begin ramping down COVID-19 testing locations. As vaccinations go up, the need for ongoing testing sites has diminished. Symptomatic community members are still encouraged to get tested even if they have been vaccinated.

The following is the closing/modified schedule for testing sites:

Boulder County Fairgrounds – June 9 will be the last day for operations. BCPH is seeking a new site and will announce details in the coming weeks.
St. Vrain Valley Schools Innovation Center – June 18 will be the last day for operations.
Stazio Ballfields – Sept. 30 is currently scheduled to be the last day for operations at this site. We will continue to assess usage in the coming months.
Testing sites in partnership with Boulder Community Health:
Lyons testing site at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints ended on May 28.
Nederland Community Center testing site will continue on a month-to-month basis.
Testing within shelters will continue on a month-to-month basis.
For current testing locations, visit: https://boco.org/Covid19Testing.

Mobile teams will be available to provide testing should there be concerning outbreaks. In addition, BCPH will continue to coordinate with early childhood education, K-12 and summer camp partners, as well as CU-Boulder on plans for the fall.

If you haven’t received the COVID-19 vaccine, get your shot today! Find a provider at https://boco.org/CovidVaccines.

For vaccine distribution data, visit https://boco.org/CovidVaccineData.

-BoulderCountyHealth.org-

Algunos sitios de pruebas de COVID en el Condado de Boulder cerraran este año

Los residentes que tengan síntomas deben hacerse la prueba, incluso si han sido vacunados

Condado de Boulder, CO – Salud Pública del Condado de Boulder comenzarán a reducir los lugares de pruebas de COVID-19. A medida que las vacunas subiendo, la necesidad de centros de pruebas continúa disminuyendo. Se sigue alentando a los residentes a hacerse pruebas incluso si han sido vacunados y tienen síntomas de COVID.

Fechas de cierre/modificación de los sitios de prueba:

Boulder County Fairgrounds – El 9 de junio será el último día de pruebas. Salud Publica está buscando un nuevo sitio y anunciará detalles en las próximas semanas.
Stazio Ballfields – El 30 de septiembre está programado para ser el último día. Evaluaremos el uso en los próximos meses y hay posibilidad que cierre antes.
St. Vrain Valley Schools Innovation Center – El 18 de junio l 9 de junio será el último día de pruebas.
Sitios de pruebas asociacdos con Boulder Community Health:

El sitio de pruebas en Lyons en la Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días terminó el 28 de mayo.
El sitio de pruebas del Centro Comunitario de Nederland continuará mes a mes.
Las pruebas en los refugios comunitarios continuarán mes a mes.
Para los sitios de prueba actuales, visite: https://boco.org/covid19pruebas.

Los equipos móviles estarán disponibles para proporcionar pruebas en caso de un brote. Además, Salud Publica continuará coordinando con educación primaria, K-12 y campamentos de verano, así como con CU-Boulder en los planes para el otoño.

Si no ha recibido la vacuna contra el COVID-19, ¡vacunarse hoy mismo! Encuentre un proveedor https://boco.org/CovidVaccines.

Para más datos sobre la distribución de vacunas, visite https://boco.org/CovidVaccineData.

-BoulderCountyHealth.org-

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Depositphotos

Everyone rejoice! Pandemic restrictions are changing. “You are now free to move about the cabin.” Well, kind of… 

Are you ready to be social and build memories with family and friends again?

Pause to ask yourself: What did I take for granted before the pandemic? What have I gained from the lesson (other than weight)? Set an intention to create habits and build preventive practices that maybe you should have been doing before COVID. Let’s get back to the basics. This is today and there might not be a tomorrow if you don’t take care of yourself.

Here are 4 basic tips as we head into sunnier days ahead:

• Eat your fruits and veggies – increase fiber and decrease risk of disease.
• Be active for at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise each week and up to 250 minutes for weight loss – helps you burn off the COVID 15 or weight gain.
• Always use sunscreen – decrease risk of skin cancer.
• Wash your hands and drink more water – easy to do and good for you and others.

Simply put, primary prevention is eating well, regular exercise, and healthy habits. Secondary prevention is preventing further disease or disability from occurring. Tertiary prevention is rehabilitation after a disease and preventing it from coming back.

Education is a powerful tool to help at all levels of prevention and …For Your Life.

As we look forward, set specific intentions with social reintegration, health promotion, and prevention in mind. Hit reset and think about things you can do at all levels of prevention to reduce risk, harm, and damage to your body, or to those around you.

With these tips, get on your way to preventing the onset of disease, disability, or discomfort. Let’s learn from the lesson that COVID taught us; we need to gain better control of our health and enjoy today; we don’t know what tomorrow holds.

Stay strong, stay ahead of the curve, and keep on being open to learning new ways to be healthier every day! Get back to basics. And for goodness sake, go get some fresh air and sun… but wear your sunscreen!

Gary Gianetti has an M.S. in Allied Health and holds certifications in health, fitness, and exercise sciences. When he’s not coaching, he enjoys outdoor adventures on foot, rock, wheels, and in the air with his little ones and his wife. He is the founder of Healthy Altitudes…For Your Life.

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PRESS RELEASE: Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

Means of Production, featuring MANDA REMMEN, NOAH BREUER, ALEXANDRA KNOX, to run from JULY 09 – AUG 29, 2021 (Opening Reception, July 9th)

In “Means of Production” the Firehouse Art Center presents work from three artists addressing issues of labor, ownership,  and consumerism. Within our lives and histories all three concepts are intertwined: they are both personal and general with real-world effects.  Manda Remmen and Noah Breuer present works that invite visitor participation and hands-on interaction.

Summer on the Streets Festival:

The Firehouse Art Center will be presenting ArtWalk Summer on the Streets as a recurring Saturday Mini Art Festival from 4pm-8pm.  Every Saturday, from July 3rd through August 21st, the breezeways and alleys of the 300 East Block, the 400 West block and the 500 East block, will turn into mini Art Markets.  Downtown shoppers can view handmade creations from 20 artists weekly, while enjoying pop up concerts featuring 6 local musicians on 3 stages.

The Firehouse Art Center is now accepting applications for our 2022 exhibition calendar:

The Firehouse Art Center is Longmont’s leading contemporary art center featuring national, regional, and local artists. Our beautiful National Historic Landmark building features two exhibitions spaces and over 1,000 square feet of space. Preference is given to submissions that are culturally relevant with a unique perspective and the ability to provide a diverse art experience. Cutting edge contemporary work and multi-disciplinary artists are strongly encouraged. Group exhibitions and curatorial proposals are welcomed, as well as solo exhibition proposals from established and emerging artists in all mediums.

Summer Resident Artist, Janelle Anderson:

This summer the Firehouse Art Center welcomes our newest artist-in-residence, Janelle W. Anderson, to take over the South Gallery as a studio space from June through August. The Artist Occupied program aims to share the creative process with visitors to the space through a behind-the-scenes approach in presenting Anderson’s work- ing methods. She will be present in the gallery every Saturday from 12-5.

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Photo: Christian Erfurt

Funny how playing with letters in words can change meaning and make such a difference. 

After COVID, what are things you can do differently to get out of a rut in your life? Will you stay online, go back to an office, go back to a gym? We all get in ruts with health and wellness. Take time to rearrange and mix up the ‘letters’ in your life to get out of any current rut.

Here’s a few weekly tips to help you out of a rut:

• Set a goal to try at least 3 new recipes.

• Try at least 3 new workouts.

• Listen to 10 new songs.

These changes can be fun while helping rewire neurons in your brain to help you be more adaptable.

You can control whether you rust or not, and that is where humans have more power than objects. When abandoned, uncared for, or left in bad shape, things rust. People can be like rust. If you don’t take care of yourself, your arteries can clog, your skills can deteriorate, and you can fall into bad shape. It is important to take time to be active, eat well, and stay happy to stave off “rust.” Be strong, prevent rust, and keep moving to avoid “rust” from forming in your body.

Remember, rest is a key element to balance in your life. Consciously find time to rest, however you see fit… but not too much. Rest is a time to rebuild, refresh, and recover from all your hard work preventing rust and getting out of ruts.

Balance some hobbies, rekindle relationships, or take time to be thankful. We may have found ways in the last year to be smarter, more efficient, more authentic, and more balanced. Keep the forward hustle while still looking back to know what you have gained from the past year.

Hop out of those ruts to prevent rust, but get rest when you are done. Most importantly, don’t be afraid to make changes to “letters” in your life to create new words with new meanings.

Gary Gianetti has an M.S. in Allied Health and holds certifications in health, fitness, and exercise sciences. When he’s not coaching, he enjoys outdoor adventures on foot, rock, wheels, and in the air with his little ones and his wife. He is the founder of Healthy Altitudes…For Your Life.

The post Ruts, Rust, and Rest | Health … For Your Life appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Art by Banksy, Image credit unknown. Downtown LA.

Shots in arms may lead to butts in seats but what about wheels and feet on streets? As COVID vaccinations ramp up, a return to “normal” seems inevitable. Will that “normal” mean an automatic return to our car-centric lives, with all the asphalt to accommodate vehicles, or can we trade some of that concrete for more room for bikes, pedestrians and businesses?

By looking at what different communities are doing across our state, we can get a sense of how our public spaces and private places will look in a post-pandemic Colorado. From the arid Western Slope of Palisade to Salida’s tourist-tracked downtown, smaller communities are reclaiming and repurposing spaces that used to be exclusively used for vehicle movement.

What does this look like? While Yellow Scene wrote about the Patio Renaissance back in June, as Boulder County patio culture underwent a Europeanization to support small downtowns,  a thus far successful attempt to serve both pedestrians and drivers, in this article we’ll examine examples of tactical urbanism across Colorado’s communities, large and small, showing how they may look different for pedestrians post pandemic.

Community Profile: Palisade

Palisade, Colorado, is a small town on the Western Slope known for its fruit farms and fruit-forward wines. With a population of 2,962, Palisade depends on a steady flow of vineyard-touring wine lovers and outdoor enthusiasts. Even before COVID, the town’s main street businesses struggled with limited seating, so COVID-19 guidelines mandating 25 or 50% capacity were a potential death knell for them.

With help from Colorado’s Revitalizing Main Streets Program, Palisade Town Administrator Janey Hawkinson saw an opportunity to allow local businesses more space to accommodate locals and tourists by creating areas called parklets on Third and Main Streets..

Parklets reclaim a street for pedestrians by extending the sidewalk further out into the street, resulting in less on street parking for cars. Parklets usually incorporate bike parking for those cyclists who want to safeguard their “ride” and enjoy the nearby restaurants and shops. They’re a fairly recent phenomenon, this side of the Atlantic, that first popped up in November 2005 when Rebar, an art, design and activism focused collective in San Francisco, held a park(ing) day. Rebar members filled a single parking meter with quarters and rolled out astroturf to convert the small space into a temporary public park.

Now that Palisade has added parklets to its landscape, Hawkinson says, the town has had tremendously positive parklet feedback from local business owners. The more room people have to relax and enjoy the temperate climate near local businesses, the more likely they are to spend money there.

Even the business owners who were reluctant to allow a parklet quickly changed their minds once they saw people flocking to them. Because of Palisade’s mild climate, the town plans on keeping the parklets year-round, COVID or not. Although, just to be safe, Hawkinson has ordered heaters for the winter months since Colorado weather is anything but predictable.

Festival Street Example: Salida – Town officials made the decision to turn the popular F Street from 3rd Street all the way to the Arkansas River, along with a portion of the adjacent Riverside Park, into a “festival street,” which is shut down to all vehicle traffic.

Community Profile: Salida

Salida, Colorado is a mountain town where residents and visitors paddle, bike and stroll along alphabet named streets. Just like Palisade, tourism is a major industry. Town officials made the decision to turn the popular F Street from 3rd Street all the way to the Arkansas River, along with a portion of the adjacent Riverside Park, into a “festival street,” which is shut down to all vehicle traffic. While streets may be closed down for art fairs and festivals by an organization, a “festival street” is closed by the city in order to  allow businesses to extend their seating.

Nearby businesses benefit when locals and tourists gather and can enjoy safe outdoor seating during the pandemic. Bill Almquist, Community Development Director for Salida, said that the city has paid for barriers and worked with the community since June 2020 as they await monies from the Revitalizing Main Streets fund. Once these funds come in, they can incorporate Adirondack chairs and gazebos. When asked if there was resistance from business owners, Almquist said many complained that people couldn’t park right in front of their businesses. Almquist reasoned that the more inviting the space is, the longer time people can spend and they’d spend even more money as a result.

Closing F street caused drivers to park farther away yet still in front of businesses. Some owners were upset at not being used to hunt for parking. But ultimately it came down to a choice between ease of parking, which is already less of an issue because of COVID-19, or opening up more space to residents and visitors. The choice to keep festival streets in place between June and September was ultimately, supported by most Salida residents.

Community Profile: Denver

Beginning in April 2020, the City and County of Denver designated 10.2 miles of open streets and 5.5 miles of Shared Streets for public use. Open streets are car-free roads inside city parks where Shared Streets allow only local residents, delivery drivers and emergency vehicles, albeit at a slower pace due to new signage and traffic-calming roundabouts and barriers.

Denver’s “Shared Streets” were chosen based on a formula of high population density, limited access to nearby parks, or areas whose parks saw increased use during COVID.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive with one resident living near a shared street stating, “I didn’t know how much I would enjoy this type of ‘walkable’ city/neighborhood. Please, please, please – make it permanent.” 86% of those surveyed, who live on or near a shared street, want open and shared streets to remain in place “after the pandemic.”

Bayaud-Pennsylvania Denver Shared Street – Beginning in April 2020, the City and County of Denver designated 10.2 miles of open streets and 5.5 miles of Shared Streets for public use.

Repurposing Streets Takes Community Input and Involvement

A pandemic has a way of making us slow down and really take stock of our lives. How much time do we spend in traffic? How much time do we hurry and rush from one location to the next? If our lives look different post-COVID, it only makes sense that the way we get from place to place would, too. Reimagining our streets is certainly not confined to Colorado. Among America’s 100 largest cities, 91 took action to protect business stability by repurposing public space to allow outdoor retail and dining, or by turning paid parking spots into curbside pickup spaces for online orders and takeout. And 20 cities also closed streets to cars to provide space for people, promote exercise and encourage necessary distancing.

Tactical Urbanism

Change happens from necessity or innovation and tactical urbanism is an example where both forces are at play. Tactical urbanism, a movement in landscape architecture, shows how urban spaces can be repurposed. The movement grew in response to the notion that cities lack adequate green space and are overly car-centric.

Parklets and festival streets are examples of tactical urbanism. Another example is found in Golden, CO’s Miner’s Alley between 11th and 14th streets. Currently it operates as an alley with the occasional car and regular trash pickups. But, perhaps spurned by the speakeasy entrance in the alley, the town has applied for permission and funds through the Revitalizing Main Streets Program to convert it to pedestrian-only use.

Another tactical urbanism example, however temporary, was this summer’s drive-in movies shown in large urban parking lots like the Denver Mart fka Denver Merchandise Mart and in Longmont CommCi (Community Cinema) from the Boulder County Collective .

Pedestrian v. Autos: A History

You would have to travel back 100 years to find a time when walking was the norm and cars were dangerous newfangled death machines. The first cars were loud, belched exhaust, and intruded into streets that, prior to their arrival, were the domain of bicycles, horses, and horse-drawn carriages.

As injuries and deaths resulted from a cruel chicken game of car vs. human, people got fed up. In 1923, 42,000 Cincinnati residents signed a ballot initiative petition that would require all cars to be mechanically limited to 25 miles per hour. Auto manufacturers, fearing their sales would be impacted, and drivers looking for freedom to select their own speeds, went into maximum overdrive, ultimately defeating the initiative.

Fearing they’d have to keep lobbying against future bills like a game of whack-a-mole, auto companies flipped the burden of fault to pedestrians. Working with politicians, they passed laws against jaywalking. It even became a classist struggle since “jay” was a derisive term for a countryside resident. They coined the term and convinced lawmakers to put the burden on pedestrians to avoid cars. Pro-car factions used fresh-faced Boy Scouts as spokespeople, handing out cards telling pedestrians to cross only at street corners. And in a very odd New York safety event, a man dressed like a hayseed, aka a “Jaywalker,” was jokingly rear-ended over and over again by a Model T.

Anyone who has ever had a car bear down on them as they enter a crosswalk can attest that our urban streets are dangerous and unwelcoming. By reclaiming the streets for more pedestrian use, the balance of power shifts from machines and returns it to its rightful owners – us.

Revitalizing Main Streets Program

Palisade, Salida, and Denver are success stories of Colorado’s Revitalizing Main Streets Program, a 30 million dollar bipartisan allocation by our state legislature. Funds were appropriated in March 2021 and CDOT is still accepting grant applications. There is $9,000,000 available for small multimodal and economic resiliency projects with a cap of $150,000 per project.

Approved projects must:

• Encourage active, multimodal transportation, including better access and safety for pedestrians, cyclists and scooters.
• Promote public health and safety by encouraging social distancing and/or providing publicly available personal protective equipment (PPE) and sanitation stations.
• Improve equity and public space access for low-income and disadvantaged users.
• Expand economic opportunity and development in a regionally-equitable way.

Although local governments apply for and receive the funds, nonprofits and community groups are expressly encouraged to weigh in.

If you live in an area that could benefit from a street make-under, now is the time to let your local leaders know. Whether you’re a business owner or a parent worried about your child’s safety, these are your roads, your tax dollars, and your time to take a stand.

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