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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Beth Macy
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November 29 - December 11, 2021
Drug overdose had already taken the lives of 300,000 Americans over the past fifteen years, and experts now predicted that 300,000 more would die in only the next five. It is now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of fifty, killing more people than guns or car accidents, at a rate higher than the HIV epidemic at its peak.
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.
“Our wacky culture can’t seem to do anything in a nuanced way,� explained Dr. Marc Fishman, a Johns Hopkins researcher and MAT provider.
The fix isn’t more Suboxone or lectures on morality but rather a reinvigorated democracy that provides a pathway for meaningful work, with a living wage, for everybody.
When I floated the idea at a Carilion-sponsored forum that every doctor who’d accepted a Purdue Pharma freebie should feel morally compelled to become waivered to prescribe Suboxone as a way to beef up treatment capacity, the response among the doctors in the room was…crickets.
