Suicide and substance abuse touch all our lives. These horrors and tragedies surround us.
In my eight years in this town, I have personally known one young man who hanged himself, and I’m friends with people whose relatives have taken their lives in what should have been their prime years.
I found one suicide victim, a man who had veered off the road intentionally to collide with a tree. I won’t forget opening that crumpled door, feeling for the pulse that wasn’t there and saying a prayer as I awaited the emergency services response. First responders and loved ones and friends found the other suicides and those who died by overdose.
I helped with the funeral service for the young man who hung himself outside Manresa Castle. He had a severe opiate addiction. He was living at the Mill Road transient camp, as it was then known (now called the Caswell-Brown camp after two people found dead in our community.) About 200 mostly young people attended that service.
The young man’s drug dealer was stopped at the door to the church because he attempted to smuggle in a small dog under his shirt. He was there to score, not mourn. Having just been released from jail, he didn’t have any of his own dope. According to a substance abuse expert who was in attendance, about half of the 200 people were addicts. Some had come drunk, and I found an empty vodka fifth in a waste can. Others were high. As I was closing up that evening I noticed two cars parked at the very edge of the church property. I almost tapped on a window but stopped when I saw people inside shooting up.
A funeral for an addict who had died by his own hand or overdose was sadly nothing new. I wonder how many of those troubled souls have since overdosed and/or contemplated or attempted suicide.
Our community’s hidden suffering, hopelessness and despair is expressed in these deaths. Yet the question of whether Lombardy poplars should be felled draws more attention and passion than these tragedies. Trees along Sims Way have been given names; the suicides and overdose fatalities are nameless to the general public.
Maybe in rarefied circles in this community some can claim they have no personal connection with anyone or any family that has lost someone to despair and drugs. I don’t believe them, any more than the city council member who told me he has no one in his family or circle of friends suffering from addiction.
A death like that of Jarrod Bramson, the popular musician whose death was attributed to homicide by his drug dealer, is not far removed from the category of suicide or fatal overdose. It was a fatal overdose, just not administered by Jarrod himself. Maybe it can be considered assisted suicide. Isn’t that descending spiral of addiction and substance abuse little more than a slow suicide? Are not every one of of the dealers handing out Fentanyl pills assisting suicide?
County Prosecutor James Kennedy’s office has provided at my request what is a colorless inventory of suicides and fatal overdoses in Jefferson County. The identities of the deceased are shielded according to state law. Those tables are found below.
Suicides in Jefferson County 2003 to Present
(click here for full table)
Partial screen shot of information complied by Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney Office at Port Townsend Free Press request.
Fatal Overdoses, Jefferson County, 2019 to Present
(click here for full table)
Partial screen shot of information complied by Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney Office at Port Townsend Free Press request.
Prosecutor Kennedy writes,
“[T]he true picture is murkier than the numbers. For example, it is not uncommon to come across a person who has committed suicide, by gun shot or hanging, for example, where drug (and/or alcohol) paraphernalia is present. We usually test the decedent’s blood for drugs in those cases and the results are almost always positive. We typically classify these deaths as a suicide even though drugs clearly played a significant role in the death.”
Kennedy continues,
“Other times we have come across long term drug users who die after having ingested a significantly higher amount of drugs than they typically use. What they ‘typically’ use is often hard to pin down with certainty — if available it comes anecdotally from acquaintances — but the inference remains that this was a suicide by drug overdose. However, since we cannot be certain, we usually classify these deaths as we would an overdose, unless there is other indicia present like a suicide note.”
Victoria Brown, age 23, is in these tables. She died of an overdose in the lawless transient camp the County Commission permitted to fester for more than a year at the Fairgrounds. The transient camp on Mill Road that the county has established with OlyCAP is named after her, as well as John Caswell. He died during the heat wave in 2021. I am friends with the man who had tried to help him that day and later found him dead by a picnic table off Sims Way.
Caswell’s death cannot be detached from his substance abuse. He had been drinking alcohol in the oppressive heat, and help had been sought at the hospital to cool him down. The hospital put him back on the street. He was scheduled to enter alcohol treatment in a couple of days. In the meantime, he had to stay “balanced” (as chronic drinkers call it) to fight off shakes, withdrawal and DTs. Is his death a fatal overdose and/or a suicide?
How many other deaths need to be added to these tables? How many suicides have been attempted, how many overdoses have been reversed just short of death? (About thirty 10th and 12th graders report attempting suicide in the past year, according to the 2021 Healthy Youth Survey, on which Port Townsend Free Press reported.)
Prosecutor Kennedy has suggested running down further information from law enforcement and emergency services, saying “this is a really important issue. Thank you for paying attention to it.” I will be seeking to obtain further information on our county’s attempted suicides and non-fatal overdoses for a future report.
Jim Scarantino was the editor and founder of Port Townsend Free Press. He is happy in his new role as just a contributor writing on topics of concern to him. He spent the first 25 years of his professional life as a trial attorney, then launched an online investigative news website that broke several national stories. He is also the author of three crime novels. He resides in Jefferson County. See our "About" page for more information.
It is a sad and pathetic situation when our county health department places more emphasis on a vaccine mandate that fails to perform it’s stated purpose; a masking mandate when masks are proven to be a failure; denial of medication proven to stop the China virus; “free” tests proven to give false positives; and a continuation of disinformation from the CDC, WHO, and our county health officer rather than the tragic deaths caused by their decision to ignore the opioid crisis. What might help is reduce the price of Narcan which sells for over $90 at most pharmacies. Everyone should carry Narcan so they can save a life. The govt should subsidize Narcan instead of garbage vaccines and unreliable tests that enrich big pharma and hospitals with our tax dollars.
The overdose death tracking started only in 2019, when James Kennedy was elected. I failed to mention that in the article. Appalling that overdose deaths were not tracked before then.
If the link to the tables is not working for anyone, please speak up. We have had some technical challenges making them available through the article.
Yes, this really is an important issue. Thank you for paying attention to it.
This increase in suicides and over-doses is not surprising in that many of our politicians are using alarmism to get us all to buy into bigger government with more programs and more taxes. Covid alarmism, racial alarmism and climate alarmism all are making too many people feel hopeless.
Many young people kill themselves because they have been rejected by their families over something political and alarmist.
Overdose Awareness Day is August 31.
For the first in Jefferson County we are gathering together to bring awareness to the people of our community. This event is happening on August 31 at the Cotton Bilding on water street starting at 3:00 pm going until 8:00 pm. We have planned to have food, music and an open mic for folks to share with all about loved ones lost. Some will share there own experience of OD and Recovery. I will be handing out Free Naloxone to anyone who wants it. Simple instructions will be given for the application of this OD reverse medication. There will be licensed counseling staff there from Believe in Recovery, Gateway to Freedom and The R.E.A.L. team.
Wow, someone actually wrote a whole news article about the city which tells the truth, does not use the word vibrant™, and does not insult us with the term “stakeholders”. Well done!
Mr. Scarantino, I am sorry you chose to gaslight the poplar activists in this poignant reflection of your experience of people who have chosen suicide – helpless, without hope or purpose, or in deep pain. In a sense chopping down the poplars along Sims Way is a kind of suicide for this historic community. The result will be the city staff’s vision, a sanitized look – anywhere USA.
In particular locals who bother with the activities of council and commissions are aware of how this once highly involved community has become emaciated, their efforts to engage have been basted in a kind of nodding-head woke rhetoric and glib public relations broadcasting on the local radio station continually laced with covid fears.
In particular the mantra offered by the Parks Advisory Board, “the poplars must go” is the cover for the city staff to exert its priorities and aesthetics, most often presented as safety, underlain with fear. The staff, often new to Port Townsend and surrounds, have no sense that this working port benefits from the poplar buffering, filtering air and providing windbreaks. The trees provide for dramatic verticality and seasonal change, they provide essential environmental functions known by those who have planted and replanted them over the last hundred years.
In the twentieth century this community came together over several years to work out a document eventually adopted by the city council. The Gateway Development Plan 1993, was intended to forward the community’s intention to keep its unique story alive; to provide continuity for future stewards such as the current electeds and their staff. The community’s wisdom and concerns were honed into a document to allow for businesses, Port industrial needs and the historic downtown to flourish along the Sims Way corridor and prevent Kah Tai Park land from becoming a parking lot for myriad formula stores.
Travelers enter into a little urban settlement, once native lands, built and loved and exploited with its history still vibrant and lucrative. Coming down the S curve the first time is a sight to behold – a mediterranean-like seaport with poplar tree sentinels to either side of the roadway. This view and the functions these trees provide was understood to be an essential part of the town’s aesthetic, the accouterments of its history to be stewarded into the future.
But in this first quarter of the 21st century we seem to have lost our way. The impetus seems to come from concerns for liability and the subsequent state engineering codes and, of course, “shovel ready projects”. Young staff simply follow code without looking up, a universal mandate offered by staff to the council, willing to ignore local plans and policies intended to provide the continuity (the golden eggs) for this historic seaport town.
Some people are making an effort to right this failed process – the disrespect for the years of volunteering meant to forward a vision that provides for a legacy. This community knows how to step up when the electeds are willing to call them to public debate and community meetings (not zoom). It’s just that we seem to have been locked down and locked out; our concerns filtered to fit. And, as throughout the history of this town, there is the dark side, the moneyed and the unmoneyed who get short shrift as unaffordable expenses.
Julie Jaman
Quimper Peninsula
See my reply to Ms. Hegland.
Now is the time to unite, not divide by taking cheap shots at other community activism. We are not diminished by caring about more than one matter at a time – this isn’t a mutually exclusive matter. This comparison is both hollow and negative; your credentials suggest better. Let’s stay on point.
No “cheap shots” were fired. I make no apologies for drawing the comparison. It is absolutely true that the controversy over cutting trees along Sims Way has generated more print and social media, stirred up more passion, and motivated more activists than the wave of suicides and fatal overdoses in recent years, as well as the crushing hopelessness and frightening rates of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts among our high schoolers. Those stories are all but overlooked, swept under the rug, ignored in our community. Why?
The problem is that the causes of the despair, drug use and suicides occur so far upstream from the actual drug addiction and death that most people are unable or unwilling to see the connection:
A person born in the last 50 years in this country has been told that as far as society is concerned, their continued existence after conception until birth was merely a result of a woman’s (and only a woman’s) “choice”.
Divorce has left many homes without a full-time father.
Feminism has left most homes without full-time mothers and stigmatized those who choose full-time motherhood.
Child “care” has become a commodity.
Consumerism and career development have replaced family and community.
Promotion of political activism has substituted for promotion of good character traits in most schools and popular culture.
Social media that promotes narcissism, vanity, selfishness, pettiness, and factionalism for profit.
The minimum wage has eliminated character-building first jobs.
Open borders flood the low-skilled labor market further reducing opportunities for young people.
Student loans for low-value degree programs are too easy to obtain and too difficult to discharge.
Drug use is legalized and normalized.
Open borders allow easy and cheap access to stronger and stronger drugs.
The list can go on and on.
The answer is to focus on policies and behaviors that promote family, community, and good character and discard those that harm them.
The youth propaganda conference will fix everything.
https://ptleader.com/stories/annual-youth-heritage-project-explores-port-townsend-area,84369?
Nate, I sincerely hope that the youth of Port Townsend suceeds in even bringing about a small change in this sorry mess we have in charge here. Please be aware that it won’t be easy and keep in mind that your generation will inherit a huge mess Port Townsend has become. If you plan to stay, be ready for a long, hard fight. God be with you.