Don Flattery, a member of the Virginia Governor’s Task Force on Prescription Drug and Heroin Abuse, compared anti-MAT judges and police officers to climate-change deniers. He’d lost his twenty-six-year-old son, Kevin, to an opioid overdose and tortured himself for not insisting that Kevin stick with MAT. His son had been on Suboxone before but abandoned it prematurely, after feeling stigmatized for it, in favor of abstinence-only treatment, Flattery said.
