By Erica C. Barnett

Amy Barden, the chief of the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) program, has started a podcast called BomBardened along with her husband, recently retired deputy police chief Eric Barden. The first episode of the show features a conversation with Ginny Burton, founder of a prison-based program called Overhaul—Unrelenting Transformation—and a vocal critic of evidence-based approaches to addiction and homelessness, including Housing First, harm reduction, and medication-assisted treatment.

Barden said the show gives her and her husband an opportunity to highlight, though not necessarily endorse, the perspectives of guests with various views and backgrounds; upcoming guests will include actor Billy Baldwin; Pallet Shelter and Weld founder Amy King; and peer counselor and drug court housing case manager Joe Barsana.

“The basic idea behind it was to be able to debate things respectfully,” Barden said. “[Eric and I] have really different lenses on most of the issues, but happily, most of the time we have reach similar conclusions about what would be most helpful.”

The podcast’s kickoff interview was the second Amy Barden has done with Burton, who interviewed Barden on her own Modern America podcast earlier this year. On that show, Barden appeared to agree with Burton’s criticism of low-barrier supportive housing providers like the Downtown Emergency Service Center—whose buildings get a high number of 911 calls because they house people with challenging mental health conditions who would otherwise be on the street—and praised Union Gospel Mission’s high-barrier shelter, which has a different population and purpose, for having fewer emergency calls.

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“The spirit of the place is different. There are more activities, there’s more pro-social behaviors,” Barden said. Asked about those comments, Barden said that “from a 911 lens, [UGM] is a more peaceful environment, but you’re 100 percent right that DESC is doing its best to get the very most vulnerable people inside.”

As the first guest on BomBardened, Burton laid out her views as an advocate for abstinence and incarceration, and mentioned that she personally hosts people who want to “kick” fentanyl at her house. In Burton’s view, using medication, such as buprenorphine or methadone, to treat addiction is just embracing addiction to a different drug—an opinion that was once common at treatment centers and in 12-step recovery groups, but has become less prevalent as attitudes toward medication-assisted treatment have evolved.

“When you’re dopesick, that’s when the clarity starts to occur,” Burton said, adding that harm reduction is a “distorted concept” pushed by pharmaceutical companies to keep people addicted to drugs that that “get you loaded.” (The general medical consensus is that in prescribed doses, opiate replacement drugs make it possible for people to function, and don’t get them high.). Instead of pushing back, Barden agreed that reducing harm or keeping people stable is not enough. “Somebody should be better off in six months and much better off in a year,” Barden said.

Barden said she didn’t push back on Burton’s views, which contradict the approach adopted by the CARE dual-dispatch team, because she isn’t an expert on addiction. “When I watched it back, I though there were a couple of things I wish I had interrogated,” she said, adding, “I’m a harm reductionist—but I’m a directional harm reductionist.”

Eric Barden, who left SPD in December, said first responders should have more power to force people into treatment after they reverse an overdose, comparing that near-death experience to someone who tries to jump off the bridge. In the former case, he said, first responders have to let the person walk away.

“That’s not what we do with somebody who’s going to jump off the bridge. We try to save them, and then we take them and we involuntarily commit them to treatment, because we know that they’re in a place that’s going to ultimately lead to their death. And there is absolutely no intellectual difference between the addict who is overdosing and is going to kill themselves than the person that’s about to jump off the bridge, and yet we treat them very, very differently.”

(Not to belabor this too much, but “treatment” is not one thing and it is incredibly difficult to access if you’re poor. Also, the state’s involuntary treatment act has strict standards for commitment, and even those who meet the standards can only be detained for a maximum of 14 days.)

Barden said she and her husband have different perspectives on addiction because “he’s generally informed by the worst-case scenario.” But, she added, fentanyl is different than other drugs, in that it’s deadly and can cause cumulative brain damage. (Again, not to belabor, but: Same goes for alcohol.) “If it’s predictable that you’re not going to be here in a couple years, I do think we should be thoughtful about that,” Barden said. “We can’t just keep Narcaning the same kid without [us] taking some kind of accountability.”

Editor’s note: This post initially misstated Eric Barden’s former position; he was deputy chief of SPD, not assistant chief. Amy Barden also reached out after publication to clarify that in her final quote, she meant that “we in public safety should assume accountability, not the person being revived again and again.” We have updated the post to reflect these changes.