Submitted by don cressy, Dec 29, 2006 19:27

Dear Sir(s),

I would like you to consider some of the unpublished effects of the Berger Commission's Prescription for Disaster. While most critics of the Berger Commission will cite the risk of Pandemic and Terrorism, I would like you to consider another consequence of the Berger Commission's Great Real Estate rout…

The city will lose over 200 (+) Detox Beds.

Victory Memorial Hospital 25 – enormous campus in Bayridge Brooklyn with spectacular views.

Parkway Hospital 45 – Forest Hills Queens with an unimpeded view of the Flushing Meadow

Cabrini Hospital 20 –An entire city block in one of the most desirable addresses in the city

Eye Ear and Throat Hospital – Prime Upper Eastside Real Estate

Beth Israel 80 Detox beds will convert to psych beds

St. Vincent's Midtown Hospital 41 – More Prime Real Estate of the more than Half a Billion Dollar Fire Sale….

There will be about 20 or so Hospital-based Detox beds from the Battery to Harlem. Those few Sanatorium-based Detox beds will not admit patients in acute withdrawal or intoxicateded patients besides those patients with chronic physical or mental illnesses. These men and women will not get the care they need and will be a danger to themselves and their communities, especially in Midtown Manhattan. 70% of these men and women who use Detox services suffer from acute mental illness, HIV, HEP-B&C, Cirrhosis, Diabetes, Hypertension, and Heart Disease. Bellevue Hospital won't have room for these patients because they will be filled with the uninsured, unidentifiable, undocumented, and out-of-state addicts and alcoholics seeking services. From South Ferry all the way up to Harlem there will be little more than 20 hospital-based Detox beds and those remaining hospitals will have their Emergency Rooms flooded with the population we deny exists and don't want to care for. That is an obscenity.

Based on an average of 61 admissions per bed annually, that will mean 12,200 less Detox admissions per year, at a possible savings in excess of $30,000,000. The absurd idea that homeless people will access the yet-to-be-developed Outpatient Detox Services is patently absurd. 75% of all Detox patients are homeless. 23% live in some sort of supported housing i.e. Section 8, NYC Housing Authority, and HASA. No more than 3-4% are capable of maintaining employment and paying rent control, rent stabilization or market rates for their apartments. New York is one of the few states that has elective admissions for Detox paid for by public funds. We will soon follow suit with our neighboring 49 states and enjoy some of the benefits that they have reaped, such as 1 in 32 Americans being imprisoned, on probation, or parole.

As an addictions professional and a recovering person, I have a bit of knowledge that few of us care to remember. Times Square and Midtown have always been a magnet for the homeless, destitute and drug addicted. In the crowds of Times Square you can hide from your dealers, shylocks, your local precinct cops, the warrant squad, angry wives, girlfriends and people you've ripped off and robbed in your own neighborhood. It's easier to steal here. It's very easy to rob and run. In most people's own neighborhoods their shoplifting and boosting careers are short-lived.

To pull a mugging or armed robbery in most neighborhoods in NYC, the danger lies not with the police but with your intended victim pulling out a gun on you, in response. Also when your last victim sees you, the victim and their friends and their family members will put you in more danger than the police. In the event you commit similar crimes in Times Square and are dim-witted, sloppy, drunk, high, or just plain unlucky enough to be apprehended, your victims will be nice people from out of town or foreigners unable to identify you, and unable testify in court against you, because - they are tourists.

Scams and hustling are also short-lived in the city's residential neighborhoods because your "Marks" are people you and your family have known for years. And, odds are, they know the same scams because one of their friends or relatives is vacationing at an upstate a correctional facility upstate for the similar offense. This ain't Kansas! You don't want to get caught after selling an empty DVD Player box by someone in your neighborhood, or selling "No-Caine" because your "Marks" can call on plenty of people to mete out justice and make you understand how there's never a cop around when you need one. Panhandling in one's own neighborhood only embarrasses your family and is not approved of, because the people in your neighborhood know your kid has not been dying of cancer for the last ten years; the money is not going for your 55th operation, it's not going to feed your imaginary kids, the food you're allegedly buying is comes in 24 or 40 ounce sizes, and is fortified with additional alcohol. Your friends and neighbors will strongly suggest you stop embarrassing your family and take your scam to the subways, preferably the Number 1 train because it has the most tourists. .

If you did get caught for drug related offenses and sent to drug court and tried, no longer will the judge's will be able to remand you to treatment. There will be months of waiting lists for admission to Detox. Those persons on parole and probation will lose those rare chances to straighten up and fly right, being summarily violated and returned to jails and prison after their urines test dirty. Another expense far greater than treatment is called, incarceration, just because there will be no detox beds available.

The 28-day rehabs in the city and throughout the state will have to close or scale down operations when more than half of their referrals disappear along with the Detox units. Over 40% of the Detox patients go there after Detox. This will add several thousand more people to the list of unemployed hospital workers. Don't forgot the contractors and suppliers, the ambulette drivers, food service, medical supply, office supply, linen supply, janitorial supply people and the neighboring businesses who rely on hospital workers. And there are the daycare workers for all the single mothers and working couples with children, the dry cleaners, and uniform supply. We will probably find over 10,000 people unemployed in the next 24 months. If those 10,000 people make an average of $30,000 per year, the Berger Commission's $30,000,000 savings will take $30,000, 000.00, out of the economy of the City of New York... Where are the savings?

There will be skyrocketing crime. The economic miracle of Times Square and it's big hearted, but naiive tourists will be ripe for crime, once again. Street cons, shoplifting, drug selling, prostitution, pick pocketing, panhandling, and assorted hustles will scare the tourists out of Times Sqaure a second time in the last half century.

Understaffed Emergency Rooms will be crowded beyond belief. Former hospital workers unable to retrain in other professions or unable to find jobs in the surviving hospitals will face dispossession, home foreclosures, auto repossessions, college drop-outs for their children when tuition can't be met, garnishments, judgments, unpaid real estate taxes, unpaid student loans, a rise in alcohol abuse, divorce, and family problems as those once working class people will sink into poverty in a city almost devoid of low-skill-qualified jobs.

All for the sake of a handful of real estate speculators?

It's funny, but the last time I looked at one of the closed units at my hospital I didn't see a single doctor, nurse, aide, or transporter on payroll sitting around waiting for a patient. When those co-ops and condos from these purloined properties are completed, sold and inhabited, the tenants may find when they leave their luxury apartments, the city streets will look more like Mad Max and the Pleasure Dome than the backdrop of Sex in the City. When you come to the city looking for Breakfast at Tiffany's', you're more likely to get robbed and your head broken by a six-foot Bi-Polar, transsexual named Tiffany, (who hasn't had her meds in a month, because the Emergency Room that used to refill her meds is closed and she doesn't have the frustration tolerence to wait 14 hours in another ER to have her prescription refilled) and by the way, she needs a couple of hundred dollars to smoke Crack.

Are we all ready for this?

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