I joined the Provincetown Fire Dept. as a part-time emergency medical technician this year. Our job is to provide support to residents and visitors on what is often one of the worst days of their lives. My colleagues serve our community with aplomb: they are professional, experienced, kind, and committed.
Speaking for myself and I’m sure for others: I do not want to find you dead. Our town needs to talk a lot more openly about substance abuse.
We often talk about the importance of acceptance, wellness, and healing. Provincetown is a historic place of refuge for the LGBTQ community, and many still remember the height of the AIDS epidemic, when the community came together to fill a void of health services for HIV-positive people. But we don’t talk much about our ongoing epidemic of substance abuse and the inadequate resources available for people struggling with addiction.
Substance use disorders (SUD) are a huge problem for LGBTQ people. Many of us see this both in our year-round community and the summer’s influx of party-seekers. The data bear it out. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health’s LGBT Study for 2021 and 2022 found that about a third of all gay men and bisexual men and women struggled with an SUD in the prior year, as well as a quarter of lesbians.
You wouldn’t know it from our county-level surveys. The Barnstable County Dept. of Human Services Substance Use Assessment from January 2023 does not once mention the LGBTQ community, though it does detail higher-than-state-average drug- and alcohol-related deaths.
The county survey did find that “the most frequently described [by survey participants] barrier to accessing existing [SUD] prevention resources, including mental health services, was a lack of awareness about what resources exist and how to navigate them…. Many participants noted that significant stigma makes it extremely difficult to access the few resources that do exist.”
Provincetown has a large recovery community, with regular 12-step program meetings (see ptownrecovery.org for details). The AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod (ASGCC) offers two “Crystal Free” and one “All Things Recovery” meetings (details at asgcc.org). As of July, a huge cut to the state’s HIV budget, through which many harm reduction services are funded, forced ASGCC to significantly curtail its Post-Overdose Program that assists people in finding placement at rehabilitation centers. The cut also drastically reduced its advertising budget. Other resources advertised on the town’s or on Outer Cape Health’s websites are for statewide help lines.
That’s it.
We can and should do more to support people who are struggling and may want help. That starts with destigmatizing SUD by talking more openly about it, and it also means putting dollars to work. A first step would be to help ASGCC fully fund its Post-Overdose Program and better advertise its services.
There will always be reasons to remain silent about drugs: concerns about our tourism economy, hereditary Catholic shame, simple social taboo. But if we don’t talk honestly about what’s happening around us and make it easier for those who struggle to find support, then people will continue to suffer, and some of us will die too soon.
I say all this not just because I’m an EMT but because I’m an alcoholic, and I am 18 months sober. The more we talk, the less likely any of us will find another member of our community prematurely dead.
Patrick Lenihan runs a small corporate communications firm and is a part-time EMT. He lives in Provincetown.
