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Thursday, February 9, 2012
Largest drug treatment facility in Central Texas to ban smoking
The largest inpatient addiction treatment center in Central Texas — also one of the largest in the state — is going smoke-free April 30.
The nonprofit Austin Recovery, which serves 3,200 clients annually, is taking on smoking addiction as part of the treatment it provides. Officials hope to dispel the long-held notion that it’s too hard to get people to quit smoking when they are trying to kick a drug or alcohol problem, said Jonathan Ross, the president and CEO pictured at right.
“That’s old thinking,” Ross said. “Not only are you continuing an addictive behavior and putting yourself at risk of relapse, you’re also killing yourself.”
Ross said he believes it’s inevitable that all licensed treatment centers in Texas become nonsmoking facilities — just as New York and New Jersey have required. Texas has a draft rule but has not taken action.
In Texas, licensed treatment centers prohibit tobacco use indoors, but a smoke-free campus is rare, said Carrie Williams, spokeswoman for the Department of State Health Services. All of the state psychiatric hospitals have tobacco-free campuses, she added.
Austin Recovery received a $49,990 grant from the Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services Department to put in place smoking-cessation programs and create a tobacco-free campus, said Ramona Cruz-Peters, director of communications and marketing at Austin Recovery.
Nearly 80 percent of the clients who come to Austin Recovery, which has three residential campuses, smoke, said Juli Hartmann, a senior counselor. “If you stop smoking at the same time (you enter addiction recovery), you have a 25 percent better chance of being successful in your recovery,” Hartmann said.
Last spring, Austin Recovery started forbidding smoking among staff anywhere at work. Thirty-three percent of the staff smoked — compared with 17 percent of Travis County residents — but aided by a smoking-cessation program, the rate dropped to 10 percent, Ross said.
Many treatment centers are resistant to banning smoking because they believe it will hurt their business, Ross said. Whether it results in fewer clients for Austin Recovery remains to be seen, he said.
“Initially, we might have a drop-off in our self-funded patients, but we won’t have a drop-off in indigent clients” because they have nowhere else to go, Ross said. “I think in the long run, we will be seen as innovative.”
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