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The moment an addict is willing to leave for treatment is as critical as it is fleeting, Jamie said; she called it the liminal phase. “You only have a very small amount of time; you have to strike while the iron’s hot.”
constellation of scars on his son’s arms were track marks.
Government help was on the way in many states, but the national treatment tapestry remained a hodgepodge, divided not only along geographical but also firm ideological lines.
Users can’t get sober if they’re dead, and it’s cheaper and more humane to give them clean syringes, say, than it is to pay for HIV and/or hepatitis C treatment.
In San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, and even Greensboro, North Carolina, drug-user unions were working to combat the stigma of addiction and advocate for harm reduction, pushing for wider naloxone distribution and needle exchanges, and even negotiating with drug dealers when batches of fentanyl entered the local supply. “Our
“When you pay fifty thousand dollars for treatment and rehab, I believe you should get the gold standard of care,” including MAT, she said. She also argued for stricter regulations of “cash-cow Suboxone clinics.”
Trump remained more focused on law enforcement than public health strategies,
The latest research on substance use disorder from Harvard Medical School shows it takes the typical opioid-addicted user eight years—and four to five treatment attempts—to achieve remission for just a single year. And yet only about 10 percent of the addicted population manages to get access to care and treatment for a disease that has roughly the same incidence rate as diabetes.
But their legacy includes the establishment of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the scientific notion that addiction is a chronic, relapse-ridden disease.
I would want her to have the benefit of maintenance drugs, even if she sometimes misused them or otherwise figured out how to glean a subtle high from the experience. If my child’s fear of dopesickness was so outsized that she refused even MAT, I would want her to have access to clean needles that prevented her from getting HIV and/or hepatitis C and potentially spreading them to others.
“Perhaps the day will come when more sensible views prevail—that relapse is the norm; that drug addiction should be treated as a chronic, relapsing problem that affects the public health; and that meeting people’s basic needs will dampen their enthusiasm for drugs.”
While it is true that doctor junkets funded by Big Pharma are no longer the norm, and physicians no longer ask reps to sponsor their kids’ birthday parties, more than half of all patients taking OxyContin are still on dosages higher than the CDC suggests—and many patients in legitimate pain stabilized by the drugs believe the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
the new CDC guideline “frightened him into abandoning his patients,” she said. (For her arthritis, she takes the synthetic opioid Tramadol; for neuropathy, she takes the seizure medication gabapentin, which is increasingly sought on the black market for its sedative effects.) “My life is not less important than that of an addict,”
“The system taking shape treats me like an addict,
Virginia, a 2015 syringe exchange had resulted in lowered overdose deaths
“We need to support this as a chronic disease the same as we support cancer and other diseases,”
If we don’t do something to rebuild these communities, I don’t see this current drug configuration ebbing in the way that drug waves of the past historically have.”
The naysayers would be more open to MAT if its proponents would more openly acknowledge the drawbacks of maintenance drugs—significant relapse rates when patients stop treatment, for instance—instead of portraying them as a kind of perfect chemical fix,
Loyd tried to explain the science behind addiction—that it was a chronic brain disease, and relapses were to be expected—
