Mental illness, drug abuse costs Oklahomans billions of tax dollars

Many members of the Oklahoma Governor's and Attorney General's Blue Ribbon Task Force had personally seen the tragedies of untreated substance abuse, mental illness and domestic violence. The group of 15 hung on to the hope that, over about a year, they would come up with recommendations to save Oklahoma lives and money.

A team of nine researchers — the principal investigator jokingly called his team high-priced accountants on a $200,000 contract — plunked down their shocking research before the Task Force.

“It was a crisis then. I'd say it's a crisis level now,” said state Health Secretary Terry Cline, a task force member.

Drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and domestic violence cost the state $3.4 billion in 2005, the report showed.

Today, a conservative cost estimate is about $4.3 billion or about $1,150 per Oklahoman, said Michael Lapolla, principal investigator of the cost study and retired professor of public health at the University of Oklahoma.

The death toll has risen since the report was released in February 2005, too. More than 500 Oklahomans died of drug overdoses in 2005. Last year, 715 died, mostly from pharmaceutical drugs rather than street drugs.

“There are several areas where we've seen a lot of progress. But at the same time I don't want to mislead anybody. We still have huge gaps in number of people who need services versus the number of people who actually receive them. Those still exist today,” said Terri White, commissioner of the state Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services.

Those service gaps form a pathway leading to the doorsteps of Oklahoma prisons. The task force found issues related to prisoners with substance abuse and mental illness cost taxpayers more than $1 billion.

But six years after the report, the prison system is still Oklahoma's psychiatric hospital, according to the chief mental health officer with the state Corrections Department, Robert Powitzky.

He said the prison system is bulging with even more nonviolent, substance abusers or mentally ill or both. The Corrections Department spends just more than $8 million for prisoners' mental health services. Psychotropic drug costs, alone, were $763,000 in fiscal year 2011.

“We've not only grown in the number of offenders with serious mental illness but also the acuity levels. We're getting more and more offenders with more serious mental issues. It's just become a societal phenomenon, really,” Powitzky said.

Much like the average nationwide, about 60 percent of locked-up offenders have substance abuse or mental health issues. In Oklahoma, that has an estimated $1 billion price tag.

“The problem is we have way too many people in prison that have no business being in prison,” Powitzky said. “In the old days, we used to put people in prison that were criminals.”

Lapolla blames much of the problem on the closing of the state's mental hospitals in the 1970s. He said the move forced by a lawsuit resulted in many people with serious mental issues ending up on the streets rather than in community care systems.

Powitzky doesn't blame anyone and said as much as the available funding will allow, the state has moved forward on the recommended money-saving alternatives to incarceration.