Opinion: Why We Oppose the Methodone Clinic

 As Concerned Newhall/Winchester Communist Club Members, we feel the proposal of a methadone clinic on the Dixwell Ave block of 794 Dixwell avenue near Elizabeth and Cherry Ann Streets, a stretch of streets full of small businesses and residences and surrounding schools and churches— is an inappropriate location for the drug treatment facility.

We will fight with the Newhallville community to ensure that the service provider APT Foundation, would not be granted a license by the state to operate a methadone clinic out of 794 Dixwell.

My name is Jahmal Henderson and I live a few blocks from the planned facility, and I worry that living in the vicinity of a methadone clinic will make the area and neighborhood unsafe for our elderly communities in the area and young children traveling back and forth to school. I have lived in the Newhall neighborhood , for over 20 years, and only heard about the plans to build the clinic when I noticed an article in the New Haven Independent about this on their website.

Newhall  is a community that we call home. We all know each other, it's like a family, so we just do not want that clinic located on Dixwell Avenue in the heart of Newhall/Hamden community, we have enough inequalities in the area as it is that we're combating as a collective, we feel it was "unfair" and “disrespectful” that the community wasn’t made aware of yet another drug facility planned for New Haven which will currently contain a disproportionate amount of similarities to the facilities in the Congress Avenue Hill Section of New Haven.

Our elected officials made their message clear: They aren't opposed to drug treatment facilities in that area, and we as a community feel honest conversations about where the need really is didn't happen here, and that's why we're fighting back.

Many Newhall/Hamden residents are voicing their concerns at public hearings that building a methadone clinic would reverse decades of hard work by long-time residents to build up the area following the drug epidemic that plagued the area from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Concerned Neighbors in the Congress Ave area also voiced fears about APT Foundation operations in other parts of the city.

The Apt Foundation facility on Congress Avenue has been described as a "nightmare”, where there is a huge increase in drug dealing, and Hill neighbors and youth have to deal with a lot of people passed out on the street, defection, urination. The clinic has become a hangout for people to use the clinic as well as their friends and the people who want to sell and get high with them, and we do not want that in our community. Other concerns heard repeatedly from business owners, residents, and city officials, is the clinic's presence will contribute to drugs and crime in the area.We as a club feel treatment facilities shouldn’t be in an inner city. We think we need to put them somewhere out in the suburbs. Basically, away from everybody. We shouldn’t make it so easy for people who do have addictions to leave a clinic and go to the street and find whatever it is they’re looking for. 

Contact the Organizing Committee: Alder Devin Avshalom-Smith (860)778-0051, Jeanette Sykes(203) 397-6528, Kim Harris(203) 916-9911, Barbara Vereen, (203) 645-7217