welcome my name is natasha sherman and i am your host as you may know recently i did a series of shows on the opioid epidemic in new jersey and we have interviewed recovering addict the mother who lost her child to drugs we've interviewed attorneys who are looking to hold accountable pharma and doctors and today my guests are from another perspective so my first guest is retired judge barnett hofmann and judge hoffman sat in middlesex county from one nine hundred eighty one to two thousand and two at the time of his retirement he was the presiding criminal judge he's also the founder of the middlesex county adult substance abuse program welcome judge tough place to be here thank you my other guest is someone that judge huffman partnered with and he is head man who is dedicated drug counselor who spent thirty years at rutgers behavioral health care and retired and is now clinical director for the center for network thirty gets work ther ambulatory detox and withdrawal program but i just want to say that you are a licensed social worker a licensed drug and alcohol counselor and you have a master's of addictions counseling so clearly you have been  welcome thank you for having me so you started this program together and that is the adult substance abuse program just happened why don't you tell us a little bit about what that is and the inception o was a criminal court judge in a criminal section of superior court in middlesex county for several years and every judge takes their fair share of sentences and of that fair share you take your fair share of drug cases it dawned on me finally somewhere around one nine hundred ninety nine two thousand when the people who i was sentencing there you're ever right to address their sentence or right of allocution and to a person the or said judge i need a program i want to program the fact of the matter is this group of people they don't have insurance and they don't have the money to go into a private program so one day i said i think i'll start my own program which was kind of a bold move because i didn't know anything about starting a program so i went to the  jail middlesex county adult correction center and i spoke to the warden told them about it he was very excited about it and said look if you start it i'll give you a housing unit called a pot that i spoke with the middlesex county freeholders and they were excited about it and they gave us some backing some financial backing which they give to this day and then i just got a little luck i saw a woman that i know who is a great philanthropist a great community person and i said i need some money and she says give me if give me a little bit about service seriously about two weeks later i got a check from robert johnson foundation for one hundred thousand dollars wow to get started and they funded us throughout the first seven years then i realized i really should find out how to run a drug program and all these years that i've been hearing people speak so many of them came up to me and said you know ed me and said this ed me and said that ed me and said this man said that so i said i got to find out who this ad man guy is so i found who he was in the us in the stop by and help develop the clinical end of the program which he did so in two thousand and one week the program went up and running on october the first two thousand and one was seven men who it was used to call my seven original astronauts and they started the program started out as and still is a ninety day program in the jail and it's not a compulsory program is totally voluntary normally you have to be there for about thirty days before you can apply for the program the reason for that is it's our way of detoxing people right we don't have a fancy way to detox so they detox we're waiting to get in the program when they get in the program it's a rolling admission  we now have a men's program and a woman's program we have a women's program probably for ten years you know so there were men's program usually has about fifteen to twenty people in it in any given time and the women's program somewhat less so the un it's a program modification program that i can talk about better than i can and we've been in business since then we have close to eleven hundred graduates wow that's pretty amazing actually i'm going to turn to you so i mean that's pretty impressive eleven hundred graduates so how do you define so graduates is one step how do you define success is there a follow up is there when they leave because from everything i've heard one it done typically doesn't work like a ninety day program ok nice but what's after that what we've done year we follow ups and looking at whether they re offend again whether they are working you know are they so we look at the whole of it you to see how well they they well the gotten comfortable with the community and utilize the assets in the community and the fact that they come back and they become a part of our program our alumni why we're they participate on the at the bases so pretty much we continue to follow them throughout the years a lot of them needed help with getting vocational training or getting into some educational institute and we were the program that could very well speak to them at their after that their period of hours to the right and often times the program has been ninety days but we kept them longer than ninety days so depending on what the need because i don't want anyone to think that it's just a cut ninety day right it depends on what their needs are and then we keep them on their we've been able to keep them longer inside the middlesex county jail which has been an asset right because usually when you all we don't have the power to do it but we if they do well in the program we let the sentencing judge know the probation department know how they did in the program now they can basically go to a couple of different places they can go finish their time in jail and go out on the street and go into an io peonage intensive outpatient program then go to a halfway house and as been the guy this really taking care of the placement when he says to people have been in contact with the program they've been in contact with him right even after he left the program and the other thing unfortunately is with all these mandatory sentences well i don't have to go to prison right so and then we were also a good feeder for drug court which is different this many years what is it and i know there's no one size fits all i mean you know as i said i've interviewed from every aspect and there's no one size fits all no one reason it's like an octopus you know to feeling comfortable with the dating themselves and as we well know we don't function well without sleep with opiates that's what they do they calm you down and that's the function now because folks don't go in trying to be addicted to the substance even with pain management you see nowadays you know they get used to the comfort of not feeling the pain and so that the common now we get is that it's a sedative like a drug that's very familiar to sleeping and so why wouldn't folks want that when sleep is very much a part of what we do every day and we can't function without it so that's a commonality i see when folks are addicted to pursue a opiates  because it brings about a level of comfort that numbs you you know you have less to think about less to worry about that's the commonality that i see i'm going to ask you kind of a philosophical question there's no right answer of course but it's like this what you've seen you know you've been in courts for many many years what do you say about us and this is something new that has to seek comfort over just dealing with life or dealing with challenges well i don't know if i'm qualified to answer that question but that doesn't mean i don't have want the new breed of opioid o p eight opiate addicted addicting people or a different group than we had before very much so these are people for the most part who were being treated by physicians for certain physical ailments and because the doctors are now being monitored closely about how much medication they dispense it comes to a point where they can't get medicine to help their pain legitimately so what they do is they turn to street drugs like heroin and become addicted to heroin which is very addictive but that we've been treating o p you opiate when they have trouble with th to people for years they just haven't been the type of people that are now getting addicted who people care about much more ok so in the past it was just you know i interviewed a former chief of police of west long branch whose son overdosed but they were thank god able to bring him back within our ken and i said you know so as chief of police before this happened to your son you probably thought that they were just a bunch of those people he said yes scumbags you know that's that's kind of the thing except now it's really it impacts and that's kind of you know a judge mental kind of a thing but that we have these attitudes and it's those people it's over there except now it's over here and over here and over here so again you know for me it's like again it's just asking for your opinion yes so do the doctors play a role are you suggesting that they are too strictly monitored no i'm not suggesting that every case is stands on its own merits and i have a lot of faith th doctors are doing what they think is right and i'm sure there are some in every field that abuse it but for the most part waiting doctors deal with their patients and what they have to do they have to be careful now they can't treat for long periods of time without a break and their patients are now turning to other sources or getting a pain medication which is in the form of heroin but to speak to yes please do we train doctors when i worked at rutgers that were they were going through a training of addictions and they're doing that more now i think historically they didn't have that training and so when they gave medications friends oddity that people were on for ten years they even look at that addictive pattern that was being created i think now that in their training and it should be mandated in every doctor training that you become an expert on going to dictions to be able to look at it to have a look at the patterns and see how it's very different sometimes with folks that have mental health issues and pain issues and very well just folks that become street after become street out for a reason maybe they have developmental problems maybe they didn't get a chance to adjust well in life maybe there's a history of familial addiction that have come down throughout the years this several ways to look at this and we have to look at all of it if we're going to address it i think sort of yes and you know it's interesting because i kind of see a lot of sides of it i've told you know i've been at the i used to just spoke to a physician three months ago and this was a networking situation and he said when you enter the hospital if you're in pain the immediate you don't even have to see that emergency room doctor at that point to face t he immediate recommendation is either morphine or dialogue try and so again you know it's like you're talking about looking at a person's individual and we're looking at systems that say ok this is the automatic now this position said if he's on call on the in the emergency room he rescinds those orders but most physicians don't do that well it's interesting you bring that up because  we have doctors from robert wood johnson medical school who visit our program on a regular basis and we're rotation into a rotation through our program one of the problems that we have seen while back is we were talking about people coming into an emergency room and getting a drug with morphine in it and a lot of those people or a significant portion of those people had been in recovery and as soon as they took that they are back on the ski without any doctor inquiring into whether or not they're in recovery where they're really have a morphine addiction and looking at the impaired nurses you know i've had nurses that have said to  me i didn't know i was going to become addicted i got it from the doctor and it was ok if you the nurses so you imagine if they're nurses they're in the medical field they're supposed to know about medication and they're not aware of the impact of continue with you know stereo even now that there is all this kind of attention being given to the over your head epidemic i suspect that someone in that situation thinks that i'm not in that category my doctor is giving me so of course i'm going to take it i think and you know i suggested this to the two attorneys i interviewed and that we as individuals have to self advocate and self educate them and question and they kind of thought that that was an unreasonable kind of idea that most people wouldn't do that and i'm thinking well why wouldn't you and you know i understand some people they have a language barrier some people don't have the you know reading skills to go on line and do the research but certainly i think somewhere along the way we need to be educated to stand up and be accountable and you know stand up for our own well being and if we don't this is going to be more than what it is at this point this whole epidemic as they say has gotten progressively worse over the years as we can see this opiate thing is not new they made eighteen months or poor communities back in the sixty's for this opium epidemic and now they're trying to reduce the number stays to six months part of treatment is to make them aware of what's going on and be able to identify what's happening to them if you don't do that then there's no accountability so it's almost like saying like don't educate them because they're not going to understand then there's no accountability without education right because they don't know the signs and symptoms as they affect that individual yes you said before really hit but we try to teach and it hit on again is that we should he to accountability yes you got to be accountable everyone that comes in the criminal case or from what i'm going to go around the country when i retire and take down bush unum in every courtroom and put up it's never my fault all right it's going to be someone or along the line they have to assume credit accountability yes yeah and that's one of things which one of the graduates of our program at a graduation state said something that stayed with me and that is that and so then again you know i was thinking you know back whatever you know the whole message of just say no clearly that message didn't work just say no to drugs and this is what your brain looks like on drugs so they were you know kind of cool ads but everybody thinks well that doesn't refer to me that's right so is there any message that we're not making that could be more effective well and i just think part of self actualizing is taking care to cure yourself and realizing when something's not working awareness accountability they all play a role in this and what happens is people have been able to say well i didn't know and that doesn't get it anymore it behooves you to know what's going on with you what's going on with your children what's going on in your community and those are the answers right there yeah yeah and you know again kind of railing against the norm but it's when i watch these the other day i had to spend the day in bed i wasn't feeling well some watching television and so many ads on take a pill take a and so it's very easy to be kind of seduced into the idea of youth and even like the the advertisement about the dad who comes to his kids and say i'm taking the day up because i'm sick and they say well that's can't take a day off take a pill so he takes a pill and now he you know and again that whole idea of not taking care of yourself that all you need is a pill and it kind of then translates itself and it weaves into all those addictive pills as well it starts with perception and that's what people don't work well with you know how people perceive what's happening in their lives you know we always talk about changing behavior changing behavior what about changing perceptive perception of what's going on how people perceive themselves in their community and what they're doing i think if we start with perception will be better instead of going right straight to behavioral changes know what's going on in their thought process and what makes it that way and how can we help you how can we intervene you know to help you change it will look at it in a different way and that's what we have to sort of do yeah and absolutely it's like that saying you know perception trumps reality and you better believe it yeah and so you know i was thinking recently i interviewed two men who were wrongfully convicted and between the two of them spent thirty eight years in prison and  the things that that we keep coming up with and i've interviewed some before is this idea that we all think that can't happen to me but it happened and it continues to happen and unless we start by paying attention and being accountable taking responsibility for educating ourselves and even then it can still happen to you but i'm starting to be less myopic about our lives and really looking around at what's the prevailing of thinking the try and then what am i buying into yes it's a it's a tough thing to do i mean if you look at television movies it's an accepted can i think of using drugs recently but i'd like to talk about the concert of people places and things which we talk about in there ok let's do that i think that's part of your question ok when we talk about people places and things right away people feel just ordinary people feel that they're product of their environment so if this is something that your environment allows and finds acceptable you know how do you individuated and i think that's what's important and that's what i try to teach them when they get in treatment how do you become your own person you know within that environment because yes the environment you want to be with the norm but you're a person within that and so you have to look at what your needs are and how well you begin to fit in that norm because some people are very conflicted by that norm but they don't know what to do and that's where your education comes into play they say  yes you're in your environment you don't have to be a product of your environment you know you can individuating be very much different to different people that have stepped out of those environments that they thought influence them in a negative way because i think when we talk about people places and thing in my own head i'm a recovering person as well in my own head i just believe that i have to make those things suitable for me and with ownership and accountability that's what taught me to step out of my environment and step into the right places where i needed to be and it takes some really down to earth counselling and not just send you to support groups which are important there are people to reinforce what you're getting out of treatment but what you're learning about yourself people places and things that's been one of the issues that folks get stuck on nowadays as i look at it because they feel that they have to be with certain people just to be in certain places and they have to do certain things that associate them with drug use and i think say to them you have to step out of that  about being uncomfortable if you're looking for change then you better look for the uncomfortable in change and when i want to change and i've been clean for two years is that i had to step out and see and take a risk to see what was different for me and i was willing to accept that every means because i've been through a live person with family history of substance abuse it's hard to break out of that cycle but you can with a woman you know that's really so powerful and we're almost out of time but it's just you know that whole thing about we spend our lives trying to be accepted and yeah but we threw ourselves under the bus in the process and we keep doing that and doing that and really all we're really after is our two individuals and you say that so profoundly thoughts of on the bus because i had to come from under the bus to really get what i needed for me yeah and i imagine other folks would have to do that fact and i agree you know i'm a life coach so for me i tell my clients all the time be willing to be uncomfortable think greek the discomfort you know when you know it's like when you get a cut you're uncomfortable but it's as you're healing it hurt yes yes yes yes because you're here to so will you are at the end of our time and thank you so much for coming thank you so much for the work that you do you make a difference in society clearly you've taken a