CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Cleveland man is suing Cuyahoga County, county jail staff and employees of The MetroHealth System for what he says was negligent care provided to him while he was in jail and suffering obviously painful symptoms of drug and alcohol withdrawal.

Adam Bartlett, 29, says in a lawsuit filed Monday that he told jail staff when being booked in September 2016 that he was abusing alcohol and opioids and was also prescribed and dependent on Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication.

He did not get his Xanax or any treatment for his addiction or the corresponding withdrawal, and his mental and physical condition deteriorated in the days after being booked, the lawsuit says.

(You can read the lawsuit here or at the bottom of this story.)

Court records show that Bartlett was in jail from Sept. 7, 2016 to Sept. 26, 2016 on a community control violation after pleading guilty to a drug charge.

Staff from the jail and MetroHealth, which provides medical services for inmates, did not properly rate and treat the symptoms as serious, even though he was at times catatonic, disoriented and hallucinating, the lawsuit says.

At one point, a jail guard found Bartlett lying on the floor next to his cell, though he was treated like an uncooperative inmate, and a physician's assistant determined that Bartlett was faking.

"Mr. Bartlett was in fact not being uncooperative or unpredictable," the lawsuit says. "He was suffering from severe and dangerous withdrawal, and was unable to communicate."

On another occasion, a jail guard saw that Bartlett defecated and urinated on the floor of his cell. The jail guards, instead of getting Bartlett medical attention, strapped Bartlett into a restraint chair and moved into a holding area, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit says the hallucinations were agonizingly vivid, "filled with children being murdered by other children, death, illegal drug activity, imprisonment, gangs that were trying to murder him, election corruption, the FBI looking for him, and tremendous and overwhelming fear of all of these things." They lasted for days.

A doctor eventually ordered that Bartlett be medicated, the lawsuit says.

Bartlett's lawsuit says jail and medical staff at the county and The MetroHealth System were deliberately indifferent to his needs and do not have adequate policies and procedures in place to properly address inmates withdrawing from alcohol, opiates and other drugs.

It says the county has a pattern and practice of letting inmates going through withdrawal to "needlessly suffer and even die" and brings up Sean Levert, the R&B singer who died in the jail in 2008 after being denied his anti-anxiety medication.

Bartlett is asking for an unnamed amount of damages on a claim for a civil rights violation and a malpractice charge.

MetroHealth said in a statement that the hospital system "is committed to providing care for everyone in Cuyahoga County, including inmates at the Cuyahoga County jail. We have not yet reviewed the complaint, but do not comment on pending litigation."

A spokeswoman for the county did not provide a comment Tuesday.

The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge James Gwin.

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