GREATER SPRINGFIELD – Treatment of addiction continued this week to be one of the major issues in the campaign for Hampden County sheriff.

Springfield City Councilor Tom Ashe, Governor’s Councilor Michael Albano and Deputy Superintendent of the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department Nick Cocchi released statements about substance abuse treatment.

Cocchi announced he would work to have a bill he helped create reintroduced in the Senate.

The Legislature did not address the bill before the end of its formal session.

Senate Bill 2432, “An Act Providing access to full spectrum addiction treatment services” would amend a law passed in 2014 and would expand coverage from 14 days of treatment to 30 days.

Cocchi said in a written statement, “All of who have been fighting for years know that 14 days of treatment is not enough time to successfully cure what can be years, even decades of addiction. The people entrusted to our care, need more time in our Hampden County Sheriff’s Addiction Center programs and in other successful programs run by organizations we work with.”

Cocchi added, “This legislation would have provided the funds needed for a real game-changer in this fight. This money would not have come from taxpayers but from insurance companies who should be providing this coverage for opioid and addiction abuse. The insurance coverage increase would cost just an additional sixty cents a year. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee, this legislation would have allowed us to help many more addicts. The financial cost of addiction to society is so much more than this 60-cent premium. I thank the legislature for passing new opioid legislation this year, but I know we have to fight together in this next session, against certain special interests to get this next important step done.

Cocchi added he has started working with legislators to refile the bill.    

Ashe conducted a press conference on Aug. 5 to discuss the August report from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. The report read in part, “For the first six months of 2016, the number of confirmed cases of unintentional opioid overdose deaths was 488, with an estimated additional 431 to 509 deaths. Current estimates for the first six months of 2016 are higher than the first six months of 2015.”

In a campaign video, Ashe called those numbers “startling and frightening.” He called once again to use beds located in the pre-release center at the jail to treat non-incarcerated addicts.

He told Reminder Publications while he was not surprised by the report, he was “shocked by the sheer number of people dying.”

He called on his opponents in the race to support the idea of using the jail’s facilities to treat people who are not inmates.

Governor’s Councilor Michael Albano quickly released a video on Facebook answering Ashe’s call for unity on this issue. Albano wrote on the post, “I’m not going to stand with Tom Ashe to make criminal a public health crisis. Criminalizing addiction is wrong. That’s why I feel treatment should be in a hospital setting, not a jail setting.”

In his video, Albano said, “This is a medical matter, not a criminal matter.”

Albano also issued a video criticizing the fact that under Sheriff Michael Ashe female inmates had been videotaped while nude and stating if he were elected he would allow representatives from the Nation of Islam to once again “offer religious services at the Correctional Centers in Hampden County.”

He charged, “The Nation of Islam was banned by Sheriff Ashe several years ago after a political dispute with Minister Yusuf Muhammad, past leader of the Muhammad's Mosque 13.”