“You have a pump, we pump the syrup for the methadone, it’s all controlled by computer,” Dr. Sadik Ali explained to a visitor.  

For six months now, Ali has been running ‘Pathway to Recovery,’ a substance-use disorder clinic in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.

He isn’t mincing words about the often-deadly impact of opioids in the city.

“Currently, we’re averaging about 100 clients a day,” Ali says. “The growing opioid crisis our community is facing is a tragedy. There’s a devastation taking place.”

The latest numbers from Hennepin County show in 2023, there were more than 10,000 emergency room visits involving opioids and 373 opioid-related fatal overdoses.  

“This is it, man,” says Duran Warsame. “You can die any moment, so you shouldn’t be playing Russian roulette.”

The 38-year-old from Minneapolis says he’s been drug-free for five months after starting treatment at the clinic.

But for a year-and-a-half, he battled an opioid addiction.

“It’s very dangerous, man, and not to take it lightly,” Warsame declares. “We have a lot of deaths; this thing is messing up our community. Today, it could be somebody [who] might have to die today, you know? We don’t know.”

One section of the clinic is used to dispense clean needles, along with methadone, naloxone, which reverses the effects of an overdose, and other medications used to treat substance-use disorders.

The work is outside the clinic walls as well.

“Giving out needles, doing outreach on the bridges, giving out syringes,” Ali notes. “Trying to get people resources like housing and things like that.” 

In another area, there’s an outpatient clinic, which provides counseling, vocational training, coordinates housing for about 38 people and other wraparound services.

Ali says about 40% of his clients are from the East African community, and about one-third are from the Native American community.

On Saturday, those services included a one-day expungement clinic for people with non-violent offenses.

The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office has been holding the clinics around the state.

RELATED: Expungement clinic in North Minneapolis helping clear non-violent offenses from record

“Expungement means sealing your criminal records from the public view,” explains Nilushi Ranaweera, a Minnesota assistant attorney general. “So that helps people get jobs, housing, even helping parents go on field trips with their children. They have turned their lives around, paid their dues to society, but still, a 20- or a 30-year-old conviction will drag them down.”

For Olivia Bouton of Champlin, it was a matter of sealing a misdemeanor conviction for driving with expired license plate tabs when she was 18 years old.

“It’s still better to get all that stuff off your record and have just a clean background,” she says. “Now I work in health care, so it’s not something I want to follow me around.”

The expungement procedure does not erase or destroy a person’s records, but it does seal them from public view, Ranaweera explains.

Meanwhile, Warsame is training at the clinic to be a carpenter.

He says he’s feeling hope again.

“I’m already engaged in a project over here, helping out with the detox center, making cabinets and beds for them,” he declares. “I’m looking into the long run, building houses, traditional and modern, and maybe get into trade skills like HVAC and being an electrician. It doesn’t stop here.”

Ali showed us a number of beds and cabinets that have already been constructed by clients in the training program.

But he says the clinic is also dealing with some hard truths about finances.

About 60% of the facility’s services are billable — Ali says the rest of the costs come out of his own pocket.

He hopes to open a detox unit in May, but right now, he doesn’t have the funds to do it.

“Just to build and renovate this place, we spent about $1.94 million,” Ali explains. “This place was gutted out, and this is what you see now.”

He says he’s applying for grants and hopes he can get some financial help from the state and Hennepin County.

Ali also hopes the area’s political leaders and the public are listening.  

“We’ve been begging for help. We want to get this detox up and running,” he declares. “This is not going away, and it doesn’t matter if we put our heads in the sand. It’s like trying to drain a sea with a bucket of water. And you can’t do it alone.”

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