Fairbanks detox center closed

According to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the Fairbanks Native Association's new detox center was closed after the facility's nurse practitioner quit citing safety issues. The nurse's absence, though, not her complaints were the reason for the closure. Terms of the state grant that the facility operates under require it to have sufficient medical oversight, and with the nurse gone, oversight dropped below the level required. State officials say that they are working to get the center back online quickly, within 30 days, and that they know what an important resource the center is. Read more here. All we can say is that they'd better hurry. This closure report follows another News-Miner report that the Fairbanks Police are cracking down on the city's burgeoning and increasingly violent "chronic inebriate community." No doubt as arrests climb, the detox center's services will see stronger demand. Despite what officials imply in the story, however, drunks menacing people in downtown Fairbanks and on the Cushman Street Bridge is nothing new. Many years ago, when we were 10 years old, a member of the chronic inebriate community tried to push us over and steal our BMX on that very bridge.