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© Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post/TNS Lizzy Earhart sits in her apartment in Denver on Tuesday, May 30, 2023. Earhart says being treated for anorexia at an Eating Recovery Center facility left her with additional trauma.

Lizzy Earhart didn’t know much about Eating Recovery Center when she agreed to get treatment there in October 2020. She’d already received treatment for anorexia at another treatment provider in Denver, but she’d relapsed immediately after. But Eating Recovery Center was big, well-known. It seemed her best option.

But the months she spent there reinforced her illness, the 21-year-old said, and the punitive environment left her with new trauma.

If she didn’t comply with treatment, she wouldn’t be allowed outside the facility. Patients were lined up each morning to be weighed wearing nothing but ill-fitting mesh or paper gowns. When Earhart expressed concerns about her treatment plans, her psychiatrist told her she was out of options and that her concerns were “just the eating disorder talking.”

“I wouldn’t go outside for a week, two weeks at a time. It just made my anxiety and other issues a lot worse,” Earhart said. “And they would threaten you with an NG (nasogastric) tube, a feeding tube, if you were struggling without medical grounds to do so. They would threaten it as a fear tactic.”

The experience reshaped Earhart’s fundamental perception of treatment.

“It definitely shifted my focus from wanting to get better so I can live my life to, ‘I want to get better so I can get out of here, so I don’t get the (feeding) tube, so I can go outside,'” she said.

Amid a nationwide explosion of eating disorder diagnoses, seven former patients and three former staff members staff described to The Denver Post a punitive and traumatic environment at the Denver-based Eating Recovery Center, one of the largest treatment providers in the country.

The former patients cast the organization’s methods as rigid and said they often layered new trauma upon pre-existing issues. Feeding tubes and room-based care — in which patients can’t leave their rooms except to use the bathroom — were used as threats to ensure compliance, patients said. Their partially nude bodies could be routinely exposed to one another during daily weigh-ins. Some said they still had nightmares about their experiences.

Dr. Anne Marie O’Melia, chief medical officer and chief clinical officer at Eating Recovery Center, said she couldn’t discuss any specific patient’s experience because of confidentiality rules. But she defended the facility’s methods as at times uncomfortable but critical to treating patients afflicted with a life-threatening disease, and she said the criticism from patients showed that the facility needed to better communicate with its clients.

But a brain in the grips of an eating disorder will try to hold onto it, O’Melia and other providers said, and that can fuel patient pushback against treatment. Three patients who spoke to The Post also described positive experiences at Eating Recovery Center.

The criticism highlights the tension that exists between treating a severe illness and respecting patients’ dignity and personal autonomy. The complaints have drawn the attention of Colorado lawmakers, who considered a bill this year to more tightly regulate the facilities. Sen. Lisa Cutter, a Jefferson County Democrat who co-sponsored that bill, described some treatment practices as “barbaric.”

Effective treatment is critical, experts say. Long stigmatized and stereotyped, the diseases are among the deadliest mental illnesses, and their prevalence doubled nationwide in both teen girls and boys from March 2020 to March 2022. Treatment is often unavailable, and stigma and stereotypes have hampered eating disorder diagnoses and treatment, particularly for people who aren’t young, thin, white and female.

Colorado serves as a national hub for eating disorder treatment, with multiple facilities in the Denver area attracting patients from across the country. Eating Recovery Center is one of the largest providers, with 101 beds in Colorado, including 36 licensed to care for patients who are there involuntarily. The organization also has programs in 10 other states, according to its website.

O’Melia said the facilities are overseen by the state and the Joint Commission, which both have strict rules about patients’ rights. The Joint Commission is a private group that accredits medical facilities.

“I want to reiterate that eating disorders can be life-threatening,” she said in a statement. “Involuntary treatment is used only as a last resort; we do not want to step in if the patient is able to manage their own safety and symptoms with less support. We intervene only when a patient’s life is threatened by their eating disorder.”

Treatment can be lucrative. According to an analysis by IBISWorld, the eating disorder treatment industry is $4 billion annual market. The number of residential treatment programs has more than tripled since 2011, according to a 2021 analysis published in the American Academy of Pediatrics, which also encouraged families to “exercise caution when selecting a residential treatment program.”

Many providers are for-profit. Eating Recovery Center, for instance, was purchased by a private-equity firm in 2017 for $580 million, according to Behavioral Health Business. Four years after that, it was sold again — to two more equity firms — for $1.4 billion.

Former staff members told The Post that the care the center provided caused its own harm, but that patients were sometimes sick enough that they had no good options. Providers need to quickly address patients’ physical health and weight, which can mean taking steps that feel excessively restrictive or even punitive, providers and experts said. Patients who are severely underweight need to be physically stabilized, they said, and will go to extreme lengths to continue the behaviors that come with the disease.

“For some folks (for whom) a higher level of care is really needed, there are aspects of treatment that are extremely uncomfortable,” said Emily Hemendinger, a social worker who works with eating disorder patients at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus.

Several former patients told The Post that they were aware of the severity of their illness and understood the need for serious intervention. But those practices were often traumatic to patients in a delicate mental and physical state, they said, and can reinforce pre-existing trauma and prompt patients to avoid treatment. One person said they attempted suicide rather than go to treatment because of the horror stories they’d heard.

“These things are important, but the way that you approach them makes them longer lasting because you can restore weight for somebody and they’ll leave and relapse immediately because of how you treated them in the process,” Earhart said. “So how much help is it actually going to be if it’s the punitive kind and outweighs the medical help?”

Treatment focuses on stabilization

Another former patient, who was treated at Eating Recovery Center’s Lowry location for two months in the summer of 2016, told a similar story, saying the experience was more traumatic than in two other places where she was treated for an eating disorder. There was a strict time limit to finish meals, and if someone didn’t eat everything on their plate, they had five minutes to down a Boost supplement drink to avoid the possibility of a feeding tube, she said.

“It was really scary, to be honest,” said the former patient, who spoke about her medical treatment on condition of anonymity to protect her privacy.

The former patient, who was 15 at the time, said that those who had too many tube feedings were put in isolation in their rooms. One girl who was there at the same time was isolated for about two months, she said.

The use of supplement drinks isn’t uncommon in treatment, said Jean Doak, a professor at the University of North Carolina and the clinical director of the school’s Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders.

“If someone has lost a significant amount of weight and their (heart monitoring) is unstable and labs are unstable and heart rate is acutely low, the 100% priority will be medical stabilization,” she said. “That is just the way it is. That becomes the No. 1 focus because of how acutely, medically unstable somebody is.”

Eating disorders are complex psychiatric illnesses that manifest physically and have been saddled with stigma, which complicates their diagnosis and treatment. They include anorexia, typified by an extreme limitation or avoidance of eating, and bulimia, which often involves binge eating followed by behaviors like vomiting or over-exercise.

Suicide is more prevalent among people with eating disorders, which, coupled with the physical effects of the diseases, make them particularly deadly. People with the disorders often identify strongly with them, experts said, making them defensive of the behaviors and more difficult to treat.

Doak and other experts said treatment needs to be individualized to patients’ specific needs and experiences, particularly given the prevalence of trauma and other mental health diagnoses. Former patients said they often felt like Eating Recovery Center offered a one-size-fits-all approach that focused on physical, rather than mental, restoration.

Hemendinger, the CU social worker, said treatment providers often are caught between treating a devastating disease and the realities of the American health care system.

“Because insurance often pushes back and cuts people’s treatment stays and doesn’t fund full treatment stays, some of these treatment centers can turn more into just focusing on symptom reduction, and they’re not individualizing care as much,” she said.

Eric Dorsa, an eating disorder advocate, said they frequently were hospitalized as a teenager for refeeding because none of the eating disorder programs in their home state of Texas took teens who were assigned male at birth. They said they also objected to tube feeding and had to be physically restrained at age 12 so they couldn’t pull the tube out.

But in retrospect, there was no other choice, Dorsa said. Their organs were shutting down, and the disorder had such a tight grip that it was impossible to make the decision to eat, they said. Dorsa has been in recovery for more than a decade after treatment at a facility that Eating Recovery Center later purchased in San Antonio, Texas.

“The only intervention I credit to saving my life was a feeding tube,” they said. “While I understand that it sounds incredibly extreme, so is the reality of an eating disorder.”

“We’re still humans”

Erin Beal, of Philadelphia, said she traveled to Denver for treatment at Eating Recovery Center in the spring of 2022. At the time, she was sick enough that she needed a wheelchair and spent the first three weeks in a medical observation unit, though she said she only saw a doctor twice in that time. Most symptoms were dismissed as anxiety-driven, she said.

Beal, 20, said she was given a feeding tube after she didn’t eat enough at her first meal and snack time. Because she wasn’t considered compliant, she couldn’t call home for emotional support after getting the tube, she said.

“They tell family members to not believe anything we say,” she said. “We’re still humans, and that’s not how I was treated.”

A therapist who worked at Eating Recovery Center in Denver until 2022 said that some patients need tube feeding to stabilize them medically, but tubes were also used as a threat if patients weren’t willing to finish their meals or to drink supplements quickly enough.

“It was very much, ‘You don’t have a choice,’” said the therapist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared professional repercussions.

A female therapist, who also left a job at Eating Recovery Center in 2022, said she still feels uncomfortable with the way some patients were treated. They were seriously ill and needed to be fed, but it’s traumatic for a teenager to be held down by five adults while a tube is inserted in their nose, she said. She spoke to The Post on condition of anonymity because her current employer didn’t authorize her to speak publicly.

The female therapist said she wasn’t sure whether Eating Recovery Center patients were threatened with tube feeding, but said she did feel room-based isolation was “weaponized.” At the same time, she continued, it’s understandable why it was an appealing solution because some patients did become more compliant to avoid being isolated again.

“When I look back at it,” she said, “it makes me sick.”

O’Melia, the chief medical and clinical officer for Eating Recovery Center, said feeding tubes are a last resort for involuntary patients and that state and regulatory oversight ensure they’re used appropriately.

Former patients described a rigid system, run by understaffed providers. Treatment had five levels, each with increasing freedoms as patients showed fewer eating disorder behaviors, Beal said. On level 1, patients couldn’t leave their rooms, except to use the bathroom, she said, while people on level 2 were allowed to eat in the dining room and make 15-minute phone calls.

To stay on level 5, where they could use their phones and had more freedom, patients had to eat every bite offered, Beal said. Staff didn’t like to order additional food if someone dropped part of their meal, so patients would eat the things they dropped to avoid being knocked down a level, she said.

“There were a lot of patients who had to eat things off the floor,” Beal said.

Staff monitored phone calls, and one hung up the phone when the patient who was 15 at the time tried to tell her mother she didn’t like it there, the patient said. (Her mother assumed the patient had gotten annoyed and hung up herself.) She later learned her therapist told her parents she was “faking” that she was getting better just so she could leave and that her decision to be vegetarian was part of the eating disorder.

The bathrooms were locked overnight, and patients had to wait for someone to take them, Beal said. She threw up accidentally on the floor when she couldn’t get into the bathroom, and a staff member who thought she’d vomited intentionally yelled at the janitor for cleaning it up instead of making her do it herself, Beal said, adding the same thing happened to another patient while she was there. Another former patient, Alexa Cohen, said she vomited as an anxiety response and would often be berated for it.

Despite the extensive rules and surveillance, patients were able to leave or harm themselves. Cohen said she passed out in a hallway on her second day in the facility and was left there for 90 minutes. The First Avenue location had eight incidents of patients leaving without permission between July 2019 and February 2020, according to inspection documents filed with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

The Spruce Street location was cited by the state in May 2018 for not regularly checking on a patient who had talked about killing himself. A similar incident happened about two months later. The facility was dinged in July 2020 after three patients used broken pens and pencils to harm themselves.

A Denver 13-year-old who was treated for anorexia in early 2022 said they could get away easily because the staff was trying to watch 29 other patients. The teen, who is nonbinary, made multiple suicide attempts, but said the staff refused to take them to the hospital when they felt suicidal again. Staff told the patient to just sit by the medication window where they could be watched, the patient said. The Post interviewed the teen with their parents present and isn’t identifying them because they are a minor.

Sometimes, the patient peeled off their skin while on “sit protocol,” where they were required to sit down and do nothing because they hadn’t complied with directions. A friend stopped breathing following a suicide attempt at the facility, though she was revived, they said.

“They treated us like we were eating disorders instead of kids,” they said. “Residential is supposed to be a place of healing, not a place to hurt you.”

Former patients and staff members said employees were frequently overworked and would burn out quickly. The female therapist who left in 2022 said it wasn’t unusual to have only two people overseeing 18 patients. Sometimes, patients cut themselves or made themselves throw up while staff were busy with others, she said.

“The staffing ratios were dangerous to both the staff and the kids,” she said.

The 13-year-old patient said they begged to come home, but the staff told their parents not to trust them. Patients weren’t allowed to hug each other, they said, so people whose parents lived in another state sometimes went months without physical contact.

“They did a lot of breaking trust,” they said.

Road to recovery

Patients’ experiences were not universally negative.

Dylan Orrange, who came to Denver from Orlando, Florida, in March 2022, said their team was “kind and understanding.” Orrange felt like they’d won the lottery with their providers, though they said the broader institution often treated patients like prisoners and that “punishment-based treatment” was common.

Shay Ayres, a transgender woman from Highlands Ranch, said the staff was “super compassionate,” took time to ask about her emotional state when she wasn’t eating and was comfortable when she expressed her feminine nature.

Ayres said she understands why people report negative experiences, but much of that is a reflection of the disease. In treatment, they take away coping mechanisms that numb emotions, leaving people feeling raw and more likely to misinterpret innocuous behavior, she said.

“The first couple of weeks are hellish,” she said. “When the treatment team draws a hard line with the disorder, you have a strong reaction.”

To be successful in the long term, treatment needs to address what function the eating disorder is serving in a person’s life while teaching healthier ways of dealing with the underlying mental health concern or trauma, said Hemendinger, the CU social worker. Binge eating can numb someone’s emotions for a while, and restricting food can be a way of asserting control or a consequence of perfectionism, she said. Obsessing about food can also be a subconscious way to avoid thinking about past traumas.

“Our bodies are easy targets,” she said. “They provide that false sense of something we can change.”

Patients need to understand that they’re going to feel worse before they feel better, because they’re losing a coping mechanism, Hemendinger said. It can help if they focus on what the disorder was taking from them, since people’s relationships and other aspects of their lives tend to wither as the disorder takes over, she said.

“Eating disorder treatment is a very difficult thing to go through,” she said. “It’s like you’ve been trying to hold a beach ball underwater and you finally let it go, and it pops up.”

The male former therapist said the group therapy sessions couldn’t delve into the trauma many patients have, for fear of leaving them worse off if they were discharged before fully processing what happened to them.

Ultimately, people with eating disorders and their families have to balance the damage that the disease is doing to their health with the possibility of additional trauma from inpatient treatment, said Serena Nangia, marketing and communications manager at Project Heal, a nonprofit advocating for people with eating disorders. For some people, it may still make sense, while others might be able to recover with treatment in a less-restrictive setting, she said.

“Even if treatment is going to be harmful… it’s possibly going to be less harmful than going it alone or continuing in their eating disorders,” she said.

Enduring effects

Several patients said they continued to struggle after leaving Eating Recovery Center. But their experiences there made future treatment more daunting.

The 13-year-old patient from Denver started eating while in a partial hospitalization program to avoid being sent back to residential treatment, but they began purging not long afterward. Their father said the family didn’t receive much therapy or support to help their child after they returned home, and it wasn’t long before the family was back in the emergency room.

“It was obvious the wheels were going to come off, and they were going to come off fast,” the patient’s father said. “We got this very sick kid, who was re-fed but who was ready to fall off the wagon.”

The teen was admitted to Children’s Hospital Colorado for refeeding again and then received outpatient treatment. They self-harmed while sitting with nothing to do during tube feedings, but they still said the experience was less traumatic than what they’d experienced at Eating Recovery Center because they could go outside and their parents could visit. They still use a feeding tube and are seeing a therapist to work through their mental health needs.

Despite lawmakers’ concern about eating disorder treatment, they stripped tighter regulations from a bill passed earlier this year, citing budgetary concerns. Advocates criticized that move and said lawmakers were allowing problematic care to continue. After the bill was signed into law Tuesday, Cutter, the lawmaker who co-sponsored the measure, said she was interested in returning to the issue next year.

Earhart, the former patient who said she wanted to get better so she could leave, said her time at Eating Recovery Center was traumatizing. She was sexually assaulted while away from the center’s campus in the spring 2022 and was told by staff not to talk about it with other patients. When she did anyway, she was discharged. She believes the concerns she’d expressed about her treatment influenced that decision, too.

A year later, Earhart still struggles with the effects of her time in treatment. She would have panic attacks in her room at night because she hadn’t been allowed outside, she said. She still gets panicky and has to walk outside to prove she’s not trapped.

Earhart’s still struggling with her health, too: She’s recently had seizures because her blood sugar dropped too low, she said. To stabilize her, her doctors floated a return to a high-level eating disorder treatment provider. She refused.

“I have mornings where I probably shouldn’t have woken up (because) my blood sugar had dropped critically low,” Earhart said. “And I was like, this is still better than going back. In the past, ERC has been so much more unhelpful that I would rather deal with maybe not waking up in the morning at my own house than being there for that.”

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By Chris Lisinski, State House News Service

Marijuana regulators voted Monday to scrap years-old plans that called for rolling out cannabis cafes and other social consumption sites with a 12-municipality pilot program, a step that one official said could bring that voter-approved segment of the industry online "a little quicker."

Nine months after a new state law outlined a process for cities and towns to authorize on-site consumption of marijuana products, the Cannabis Control Commission pivoted away from past regulations that would have constrained the launch to a dozen cities and towns.

CCC staff will now set out to craft a regulatory framework awarding licenses to locations where patrons will be able to purchase and enjoy marijuana products on the premises, in contrast from the existing retail stores that have been open for years.

Commissioner Nurys Camargo, a member of a working group that recommended the change in approach, said the decision to drop the pilot program encourages municipalities to decide whether they will opt in to social consumption and allows regulators to devote their attention to longer-term questions about the industry rather than operation of a limited pilot program.

"It's sort of a parallel track. It's going to allow us to create [social consumption] a little quicker, but this is still not going to be done overnight," Camargo told reporters after the commission's meeting. "Everyone's wondering: what is it? What is the regulatory framework? What are the licenses? I think that now, we can really start thinking about what does that look like, especially now that we don't have a pilot project in place."

"If we would have had a pilot project in place, then we'd have to think about a pilot license, and a pilot license would get stuck in our regs for the next three to five or six years, knowing how things move slowly throughout the process," she added.

After a lengthy discussion, Commissioners Ava Callendar Concepcion, Camargo and Stebbins voted in favor of eliminating the pilot program language from the commission's recreational marijuana regulations, as did CCC Chair Shannon O'Brien.

While she supported the change, O'Brien said she still has several unanswered questions about how the broader regulations will address the risks of secondhand smoke inside marijuana cafes, impairment, and promoting business success for equity applicants, microbusinesses and craft cooperatives, who under existing regulations will have exclusive access to social consumption licenses for the first 36 months.

"If we don't get this right during the exclusivity period, I think that we could be harming that opportunity for people," O'Brien told reporters.

Commissioner Kimberly Roy voted present, saying she did not have "enough information around public safety, public health and equity" impacts.

"Sometimes, even things done with the best intentions can go awry, whether it's the delivery operator -- which was done with the best intentions, right, to remove barriers and to help people and to create equity," she said. "Microbusinesses were a license type that was done with the best intentions. Craft cooperative farmers, same thing. And these have either not worked or struggled or they're failing."

All other commissioners voted in favor.

The ballot question legalizing recreational marijuana use that voters approved in 2016 included language authorizing marijuana consumption "on the premises where sold" and at special licensed events, but cannabis cafes have yet to open to the public nearly seven years later.

Regulators pumped the brakes in 2018 after then-Gov. Charlie Baker and Attorney General Maura Healey, who succeeded Baker in the corner office, raised concerns about the pace of the rollout.

Baker for years also sought to overhaul the state's drugged-driving laws but met resistance in the Legislature.

In 2019, the CCC's working group recommended launching social consumption with a pilot program, and officials also determined that the Legislature needed to update state law to deliver cities and towns the mechanism they needed to authorize on-site cannabis use. That change became part of a wide-ranging law Baker signed last year, which also boosted oversight on the host community agreements between marijuana businesses and municipalities.

Commissioner Bruce Stebbins, who also served on the social consumption working group, said Monday that the process of standing up and running a pilot program with the new law now on the books would be "both burdensome and expensive."

"Right now, to help direct our work, we don't feel that the pilot program is needed as it's written. So help us take that work off our plate," Stebbins said. "Our feeling is that eliminating the pilot program will help us dive in to building that licensing and regulatory framework."

The previous regulations called for limiting participation in the social consumption pilot program to a dozen cities and towns -- less than half of the 30 communities dubbed "disproportionately impacted" by past marijuana prohibition, who must receive some kind of positive impact from new cannabis establishments.

Stebbins said if the CCC received more than 12 applicants for the pilot program, the commission could wind up "in the position of having to reject a community's application."

"We would also be limiting a community's ability to adopt social consumption as an integral part of their municipal equity plan," he said.

Concepcion, who voted in favor of eliminating the pilot program, later told reporters that it's "too early" to tell if regulators will impose a limit on the number of social consumption licenses in the final regulations.

The group Equitable Opportunities Now, which seeks to empower people of color in the recreational marijuana industry, previously called on regulators to move toward a "comprehensive, equitable, safe and healthy onsite consumption licensing and regulatory framework" instead of a pilot program.

"We appreciate Commissioners Camargo and Stebbins' leadership on this issue and the thoughtful discussion of the full Commission and look forward to working together to ensure that this exciting new license type creates meaningful opportunities for communities most harmed by the war on drugs," said EON Policy Co-chair Armani White.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission wants to establish its credibility with hunters in Blair and Bedford counties where the agency says chronic wasting disease threatens the future of the deer population in the entire state.

Game Commission Executive Director Bryan Burhans has acknowledged hunters’ mistrust led the commission to withdraw its plan to use sharpshooters to kill deer in an attempt to slow the spread of CWD.

“The public engagement in this process has to be first and foremost,” Burhans said. “They don’t want to trust what we want because it affects their hunting season next year. We are asking people to make a sacrifice in order to benefit the deer herd for their kids. And while that may seem simple, and who wouldn’t agree with that, there are a lot that don’t.”

Starting in late January, local hunters and landowners organized to deny the Pennsylvania Game Commission access to property to carry out a targeted removal of potentially 2,000 deer in Blair County for a pilot study to determine whether lower deer herd numbers would slow the spread of the disease.

A video recording of a March 25 Game Commission work group meeting offered a window into one commissioner’s frustration and perception of the resistance it has faced from hunters in the south central region.

During the meeting, Com­missioner Tim Layton said that he believes only a few hunters are holding up the plan.

Layton is one of the eight unpaid game commissioners appointed by the governor.

“For us to not be able to counter what literally seven, eight, nine or 10 hunters are doing to get on a camera to say we don’t know what we are doing is just — it’s frustrating to me because we are spending $1.8 million a year on research and all they are doing is waking up in the morning and saying ‘They are not doing what we want them to do,'” Layton said.

Hunters organize

Hunters in south central Pennsylvania formed a group called Sportsmen for the Future.

Ken Knisely of Hol­lidaysburg is the group’s legislative coordinator.

While the group’s leadership is about 10 people, the support is in the thousands, Knisely said.

The commission’s plan for USDA professionals to herd and shoot deer at night came to a halt because they were being turned away by property owners, and an official halt was announced when state Rep. Jim Gregory, R-Hollidaysburg, took his constituents’ voices to the commission, along with Sen. Judy Ward, R-Blair, and Rep. Jesse Topper, R-Bedford.

Commissioners point to Illinois where targeted removals have been carried out each year since 2002. They say that action kept the CWD prevalence rate at 2 percent.

“We have got to do something from a public relations standpoint that can bring everybody in to say, ‘Look, they actually do know what they are doing. We want to be Illinois. … I’m just passionate about this,” Layton said.

However, hunters in south central Pennsylvania believe the death toll for healthy deer shot during Illinois targeted removals is too high, and the disease still persists. In addition, hunters dispute the commission’s estimates for deer numbers in south central Pennsylvania and say targeted removal of deer will thin the herd unnecessarily.

In the battle for the best path forward, Burhans believes the Game Com­mission had the full support of Legislature.

“For the exception of, say, one, we have had great support from Legislature,” he said.

In a followup with the Mirror, Game Commission spokesman Bert Einodshofer said Burhans was not singling out Gregory or any specific legislator as the “one.”

The CWD issue also has gotten attention from Pennsylvania members of Congress, including U.S. Rep John Joyce, R-13th District.

“The message from my constituents has been loud and clear on this issue: they want me to push for a solution that finds a cure for the disease, without hurting the hunting community,” an emailed statement from Joyce said. “The people of the 13th District were outraged by the Game Commission effort to reduce the deer population without first trying to find a cure through science. That is why I co-sponsored HR 837, which would commission a federal study for CWD without killing deer, and I am in the process of working with my colleagues in the House to properly secure funding for that legislation through the appropriations process.

Joyce is also planning to partner with Congressman Glenn Thompson on an additional piece of legislation related to HR 837 and CWD.

“Of all the district-specific issues that I have been working on since I have been in Congress, CWD is certainly in the top three,” Joyce stated.

Joyce and Thompson both attended a March 10 meeting of about 300 hunters in Blair County that featured ecologist and biologist John Eveland, who is working with a team of scientists to create a CWD vaccine in the next five years.

False hope?

Burhans alluded to the development of a vaccine and said it was giving hunters false hope.

“We’ve been doing outreach events over the past two years. The problem is there is a lot of misinformation out there now. We’ve heard there’s going to be a cure in the next three years,” he said. “We know it won’t come to fruition, but people want to believe it. Those are things we are in constant battle with.”

As the Game Commission moves forward, it must partner with the public, said Matthew Schnupp, wildlife management bureau director, during the working group meeting.

“We learned a lot this year. Everyone is well-aware of what went down with folks in the south central region and what we’ve gone through with the research project,” he said. “We had to recalibrate everything. Our path forward was not working. We had sent USDA out to knock on doors. We got some feedback that maybe we need Game Commission employees doing that.”

Schnupp said there many things that the commission must do differently as it attempts to re-evaluate a plan to address CWD.

“One of the major things we are taking initiative to do is get input from other states and researchers and getting them involved to provide third-party criticism of what is successful across the nation and what is not successful,” Schnupp said.

He said the CWD working group is setting the table for a plan.

Schnupp said that plan might be no less aggressive or without a need for targeted removal, but the difference would be more public engagement.

“We want to engage the right partners — engage the NGOs, engage the public, engage other researchers at federal and state level — so that as we develop it and roll it out we do it with the right message and the right response.

“I hear a lot of folks say, ‘You have to spend more time setting a foundation throughout the year … establishing credibility and letting people know about this rather than just ‘boom, here it is a week before when the gun’s in-hand,'” Schnupp said.

Stopping plan right move

Schnupp said he believes the commission was right to withdraw its targeted re­moval planned for the study in Blair County.

“And I think we bought a lot of credibility because we didn’t push through with our path and put our head down and say ‘we are not listening to you’ and come in and at all costs do what we have to do,” Schnupp said.

“We stopped, stepped back and now we are getting input from the right people to build a sustainable plan that is aggressive enough to have an effect.”

But the clock is ticking. The feeling at the table was that the commission doesn’t have the capability of sitting back for long. The question floated around the table: “Are we looking at taking action a year from now, two?”

CWD was discovered in Pennsylvania in 2012 and has spread.

Game Commission CWD coordinator Jared Oister said more than 90 percent of positive tests for CWD over the years are found in Disease Management Area 2, he said, pointing to a chart of Blair and Bedford counties.

While all 2018 CWD samples are not yet analyzed, “We already have 70 positive samples this year,” he said. “I presume to have 100 positives when analyses of all samples are completed. There are still 4,000 samples that need to come out of the lab. There were about 6,000 taken total. Those samples included hunter submitted samples.”

He said each year there is an exponential increase of positives.

“If we don’t change anything drastically, we will be on the same trajectory in 10 years and be at 20 to 30 percent prevalence within our core area in Disease Management Area 2,” he said.

Mirror Staff Writer Russ O’Reilly is at (814) 946-7435.

May 20—The current tension between the Rochester Police Department and the Rochester Police Policy Oversight Commission is disappointing, but not terribly surprising.

People who haven't worn the uniform can't fully understand the difficulty and stress of being a police officer. Therefore, we can at least partially understand the Rochester Police Department's lack of enthusiasm regarding suggestions from a group of citizens that is tasked with questioning department policies, procedures and practices.

That's fine. We're not asking the police to be enthused about inquiries and/or recommendations from the Rochester Police Policy Oversight Commission. But we are asking — nay, demanding — that they treat the commission, its members and their recommendations with respect.

Right now, that respect seems to be lacking.

The commission dates back to 2015, born of national distrust for police departments and a desire for civilian oversight. Its seven members, appointed by the Rochester mayor with input from the NAACP and the Olmsted Human Rights Commission, meet monthly. Their primary tasks can be summarized as follows:

* Analyzing RPD policies and procedures in the light of state and federal law, as well as the expectations of the community.

* Reviewing complaints against officers as well as challenges to existing policies and/or procedures.

* Making policy and procedural recommendations to RPD.

Last week, commission chair Aurora DeCook made it clear that she doesn't think the system is working. "We could have a unanimous vote that something should be changed, and it is going to make zero difference because we are not the decision-makers," she said. As proof, she referenced the fact that the commission made 10 recommendations last year, but RPD adopted only one of them.

In short, DeCook said the commission needs "some sort of teeth" if it is to create change.

We're not certain that "teeth" are the answer. Rather, we'd argue that what the commission needs is respect and transparency from RPD, especially Chief Jim Franklin.

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Full disclosure: Right now, Franklin and the Post Bulletin aren't on the best of terms. When PB reporter Mark Wasson contacted RPD with questions about the policy commission, RPD Communications Coordinator Amanda Grayson wrote in response that Franklin would not be interviewed and called Wasson "anti-law enforcement."

That's untrue. Wasson asks tough, fair questions. As journalists, one of our most important jobs is to question public officials and to hold them accountable for their actions and the actions of those they supervise. Failing to answer a reporter's questions will lead some people to conclude that an official is hiding something — which, of course, is the exact opposite of transparency.

And it's not just the PB that Franklin has brushed off. DeCook and the commission have encountered roadblocks and delays when seeking information and data about complaints filed against RPD officers, and even a simple request for a copy of RPD's policy handbook was rebuffed multiple times before the document finally was posted online.

We'd like to be able to say that Mayor Kim Norton is caught in the middle of this tension, but right now she seems to be leaning toward RPD's side. She defended the department's right to set its own policies and said that even if the commission's recommendations don't lead to change, "the discussion that happens and the rationale that is given is important to have."

And, Norton rightly points out that if the commission is unhappy with RPD's response to its recommendations, it has recourse. It can take its concerns to Norton herself, and ultimately to the city council — but so far, the commission has not done so. That leads Norton to conclude the commission has "been satisfied with the rationale they've been given as to why that change is not being brought forward."

That's an easy, comforting conclusion, but DeCook's public statements seem to indicate longstanding dissatisfaction with RPD's rationale for rejecting the commission's recommendations. Also dissatisfied is longtime Rochester civil rights activist W.C. Jordan, a former commission member who said Franklin deliberately muddied the water concerning the department's diversity rates. "I think Chief Franklin came in and immediately tried to hide different things," Jordan said.

We like the commission, and we want it to continue. Citizens have a right — even a duty — to question their leaders and those whose salaries are paid through taxes.

But clearly, there's been a communication breakdown. The involved parties appear to be working against each other, not with each other.

So, what now?

For starters, Franklin and RPD need to acknowledge the importance of the commission's work and provide it with the information it needs to do that work. Next, Norton, who is Franklin's boss, needs to make it clear to him that a police chief's job description includes public relations — which means working with the policy commission and with local media.

And finally, the oversight commission must be ready to take things to the next level when the need arises. If RPD refuses a recommendation that the commission strongly supports, it should take the matter to the mayor's office.

To date, Rochester has avoided the national outrage that comes with a high-profile police-involved shooting or glaring example of misconduct. While we can't ensure that a strong, active police oversight commission will keep Rochester out of that spotlight forever, it certainly can't hurt.

BOSTON — Marijuana regulators voted this week to scrap years-old plans that called for rolling out cannabis cafes and other social consumption sites with a 12-municipality pilot program, a step that one official said could bring that voter-approved segment of the industry online “a little quicker.”

Nine months after a new state law outlined a process for cities and towns to authorize on-site consumption of marijuana products, the Cannabis Control Commission pivoted away from past regulations that would have constrained the launch to a dozen cities and towns.

CCC staff will now set out to craft a regulatory framework awarding licenses to locations where patrons will be able to purchase and enjoy marijuana products on the premises, in contrast from the existing retail stores that have been open for years.

Commissioner Nurys Camargo, a member of a working group that recommended the change in approach, said the decision to drop the pilot program encourages municipalities to decide whether they will opt in to social consumption and allows regulators to devote their attention to longer-term questions about the industry rather than operation of a limited pilot program.

“It’s sort of a parallel track. It’s going to allow us to create (social consumption) a little quicker, but this is still not going to be done overnight,” Camargo told reporters after the commission’s meeting. “Everyone’s wondering: what is it? What is the regulatory framework? What are the licenses? I think that now, we can really start thinking about what does that look like, especially now that we don’t have a pilot project in place.”

“If we would have had a pilot project in place, then we’d have to think about a pilot license, and a pilot license would get stuck in our regs for the next three to five or six years, knowing how things move slowly throughout the process,” she added.

After a lengthy discussion, Commissioners Ava Callendar Concepcion, Camargo and Stebbins voted in favor of eliminating the pilot program language from the commission’s recreational marijuana regulations, as did CCC Chair Shannon O’Brien.

While she supported the change, O’Brien said she still has several unanswered questions about how the broader regulations will address the risks of secondhand smoke inside marijuana cafes, impairment, and promoting business success for equity applicants, microbusinesses and craft cooperatives, who under existing regulations will have exclusive access to social consumption licenses for the first 36 months.

“If we don’t get this right during the exclusivity period, I think that we could be harming that opportunity for people,” O’Brien told reporters.

Commissioner Kimberly Roy voted present, saying she did not have “enough information around public safety, public health and equity” impacts.

“Sometimes, even things done with the best intentions can go awry, whether it’s the delivery operator — which was done with the best intentions, right, to remove barriers and to help people and to create equity,” she said. “Microbusinesses were a license type that was done with the best intentions. Craft cooperative farmers, same thing. and these have either not worked or struggled or they’re failing.”

All other commissioners voted in favor.

The ballot question legalizing recreational marijuana use that voters approved in 2016 included language authorizing marijuana consumption “on the premises where sold” and at special licensed events, but cannabis cafes have yet to open to the public nearly seven years later.

Regulators pumped the brakes in 2018 after then-Gov. Charlie Baker and Attorney General Maura Healey, who succeeded Baker in the corner office, raised concerns about the pace of the rollout.

Baker for years also sought to overhaul the state’s drugged-driving laws but met resistance in the Legislature.

In 2019, the CCC’s working group recommended launching social consumption with a pilot program, and officials also determined that the Legislature needed to update state law to deliver cities and towns the mechanism they needed to authorize on-site cannabis use.

That change became part of a wide-ranging law Baker signed last year, which also boosted oversight on the host community agreements between marijuana businesses and municipalities.

Commissioner Bruce Stebbins, who also served on the social consumption working group, said Monday that the process of standing up and running a pilot program with the new law now on the books would be “both burdensome and expensive.”

“Right now, to help direct our work, we don’t feel that the pilot program is needed as it’s written. So help us take that work off our plate,” Stebbins said. “Our feeling is that eliminating the pilot program will help us dive in to building that licensing and regulatory framework.”

The previous regulations called for limiting participation in the social consumption pilot program to a dozen cities and towns — less than half of the 30 communities dubbed “disproportionately impacted” by past marijuana prohibition, who must receive some kind of positive impact from new cannabis establishments.

Stebbins said if the CCC received more than 12 applicants for the pilot program, the commission could wind up “in the position of having to reject a community’s application.”

“We would also be limiting a community’s ability to adopt social consumption as an integral part of their municipal equity plan,” he said.

Concepcion, who voted in favor of eliminating the pilot program, later told reporters that it’s “too early” to tell if regulators will impose a limit on the number of social consumption licenses in the final regulations.

The group Equitable Opportunities Now, which seeks to empower people of color in the recreational marijuana industry, previously called on regulators to move toward a “comprehensive, equitable, safe and healthy onsite consumption licensing and regulatory framework” instead of a pilot program.

“We appreciate Commissioners Camargo and Stebbins’ leadership on this issue and the thoughtful discussion of the full Commission and look forward to working together to ensure that this exciting new license type creates meaningful opportunities for communities most harmed by the war on drugs,” said EON Policy Co-chair Armani White.

The state’s Cannabis Control Commission on Monday took a step its members said would help streamline the process for getting cannabis cafes and marijuana lounges up and running in Massachusetts.

The commission voted to scrap a pilot program that would initially limit social consumption establishments — places where people can buy marijuana products and use them onsite — to 12 communities.

Commissioner Bruce Stebbins said the pilot program would involve a “burdensome and expensive” process, and that by eliminating it, the commission could instead focus on developing a broader licensing framework for all social consumption sites.

“Our suggestion is, if you want us to go and work on the pilot program, that’s step one and that will take an extended period of time,” Stebbins said. “We’re saying, right now, to help direct our work, we don’t feel that the pilot program is needed as it’s written.”

Stebbins and Commissioner Nurys Camargo lead a Cannabis Control Commission working group exploring issues around social consumption.

Camargo said that instead of a pilot program, there are many other steps the commission can take to ease opening cafes and lounges, including working with cities and towns interested in hosting one of the new businesses.

“That’s going to allow our licensees to start thinking, ‘Hey, I do want to go to this town, I don’t want to go to this town,’” she said.

Four commission members voted to do away with the pilot. The fifth commissioner, Kimberly Roy, voted present, saying she wanted to know more about public health, public safety and equity impacts.

The 2016 ballot question that legalized adult marijuana use in Massachusetts envisioned social consumption sites, but more than six years later, those locations are not yet a reality.

The commission wrote the pilot program into its regulations in 2019.

Since then, the panel’s membership has shifted to a new slate of commissioners, the Massachusetts marijuana industry has continued to grow, and state lawmakers passed a package of cannabis reforms, including, among other measures, a process for cities and towns to opt in to allowing social consumption sites.

Ahead of Monday’s meeting, the Equitable Opportunities Now coalition sent a letter to the commission, asking its members to “set aside the social consumption pilot program in the interest of avoiding overly burdensome regulations, removing artificial and unnecessary barriers, respecting local control, advancing the commission’s licensing prerogative, and providing clarity to potential entrepreneurs from disparately harmed communities and their potential host communities.”

The letter said the pilot would create uncertainty for potential operators of social use sites, “artificially” limit the number of communities that could host the establishments and empower the commission “to pick winners and losers.”

“We look forward to working together to ensure that this exciting new license type creates meaningful opportunities for communities most harmed by the war on drugs,” Armani White, the coalition’s public policy co-chair, said in a statement after the vote.

With the pilot program now off the table, Camargo said commissioners are inviting public outreach on social consumption before it dives into the formal regulatory process. She said they’ll talk to officials from other states where marijuana is legal and host listening sessions, including a virtual one coming up in June.

Katie Lannan covers the State House for GBH News.

New Delhi [India], June 6 (ANI): National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) Chairperson Priyank Kanoongo is planning to approach Vinai Kumar Saxena, Lieutenant Governor (LG) of Delhi regarding the obstacles faced during their rescue operations at Delhi's Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station targeting child labour.

Further going on about the matter, Kanoongo said that the NCPCR has been conducting rescue operations in 100 locations as World Day Against Child Labour is nearing.

"World Day Against Child Labour is celebrated on June 12, over which rescue operations are conducted in almost 100 areas. We have informed all the DMs beforehand. However, the rescue operation was interrupted near the Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station by the SDM. Similar incidents took place last year as well. We will file a complaint over the issue to Delhi LG," Kanoongo said.

Notably, World Day Against Child Labour was adopted on June 12 in 2002 by the United Nations body, International Labour Organisation. The International Labour Organization supports and provides basic education, medical and other services to children.

On this occasion, many events, and campaigns are also organized showing concern for the children who become victims of child labour across the world. The 'Universal Social Protection to End Child Labour' is the theme dedicated to World Day Against Child Labour this year. (ANI)