A slow trainwreck is finally grinding to a stop in the north end of Ulster County, as Samadhi, a Saugerties-based drug treatment nonprofit, abruptly shuttered a 27-bed emergency housing facility and laid off three-quarters of their staff.

The bottom fell out on Samadhi as a result of the nonprofit’s failure to turn over the results of an audit of their 2023 financials. The audit, which is now nearly a year overdue, was triggered by red flags raised during the previous year’s audit, which found $55,000 in ATM withdrawals unaccountably drawn from the group’s accounts during 2022. Since then, the situation has gotten bleaker and various revenue sources have closed one-by-one.

To start with, Ulster County Comptroller March Gallagher stopped payment on a $797,000 county contract to provide outreach services. Samadhi also got confused about the process to reimburse some $400,000 for individuals not enrolled in an emergency housing program run by the county, and now they won’t see that money either.

The worst blow was the loss of faith from NoVo in Kingston, a foundation that had pumped at least $2 million in cash into Samadhi and has since, apparently, cut ties. According to media reports, until the foundation announced its cutoff on April 15, the organization thought it would be getting almost $350,000 more from NoVo this year.

“A year ago, we raised the red flag on the financial and administrative controls at Samadhi,” Gallagher stated back in April. “We tried to work with them to obtain compliance, but they refused our requests for information needed to bring controls.” We can’t think of a worse thing a donor would want to hear about a group they’ve given to. It just screams cover-up.

On the surface, Samadhi was a great story: a former addict starts a grassroots treatment service, incorporating some different approaches to dealing with one of Ulster’s most difficult problems. Its non-traditional approach centered around “mindfulness” – a powerful word in these parts, especially attached to a Buddhist name, and its practice of meeting addicts where they were, fit in perfectly with Ulster’s communal vibe. But the simple truth is, if you want to help people, you need resources, and that means you must follow the conditions those resources came with.

Unaccounted-for ATM withdrawals are a hard thing to forget, and the $55,000 in 2022 was just the beginning. While waiting for the never-delivered 2023 audit, Gallagher’s office took a look at Samadhi’s 2023 financials on their own. They found the group that year had made $134,830 in ATM and cash withdrawals and $60,308 in cash transfers using apps like Venmo and PayPal. Many of the transfers, which averaged $976, went to individuals with active drug addictions, the report alleged. Gallagher’s report also identified $17,310 in transfers to bank accounts of Samadhi Executive Director David McNamara and family members.

McNamara, who stepped down in February, says the withdrawals were for petty cash rewards like flowers, gifts, and meals to celebrate clients’ sober anniversaries or other accomplishments, but no one could be blamed for fearing that at least some of that money went to feeding addictions, potentially undoing the Samadhi’s own work. A handful of receipts could have eased a lot of anxiety.

The real shame of Samadhi – which, by the way, means something close to ‘concentration,’ the exactly quality the organization failed to demonstrate – isn’t the sloppy accounting and possible misuse of millions in public and private funds by the imploding addiction treatment provider. It isn’t just the 25 lost jobs, although that is a sincere and profound tragedy. The real shame is unless and until somebody or something steps up to fill the hole Samadhi’s left behind, a lot of suffering people in Ulster County will go without help and there’s a good chance that some of them will die.

We have a handful of such centers on the south side of the county, and there are a few more in Sullivan and Orange, but here, as in just about all places and all times, there appear to be far more people in need of treatment than people receiving it. The loss of one such center strains the entire system.

Samadhi vows to carry on, but exactly how, its reputation in shreds and its funders in full retreat, is an open question. In the meantime, Ulster has 25 fewer employees working on addiction treatment and 27 fewer beds for people in need.