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Try Methadone, Suboxone for Addicts

Editor, News-Register:

After viewing the symposium on drug abuse held at the Wheeling Park White Palace, wherein costly, long-term, and abstention, and faith-withdrawal treatments were offered for drug addicts — harsh, long incarcerations still on the table — it becomes clear that these treatments for a multitude of reasons — cost, distance, technique, intense monitoring, and length of time — fall short of what is needed to address the problem of drug addiction.

Judicial representatives and law enforcement mean well, but their primary purposes are to arrest, sentence according to law, and incarcerate. And, incarcerating drug users — especially marijuana users — and drug addicts has been and will continue to be a policy of failure in West Virginia. I believe it is time for the state to take a smarter and more-humane approach to drug addiction and drug overdose.

Statistics have shown that heroin addiction is extremely difficult to quit; even after long periods of incarceration, addicts will pick up the habit again and will once again be incarcerated — for many addicts, it will be a vicious cycle. Some of the aforementioned treatments are too draconian, too expensive, and too distant.

Currently West Virginia takes a get-tough approach to drug addition, incarcerating users and those who break their probation for long periods of time — at great expense to the state: Jail $18,000 per year; prison $28,000 per year. The only softness in the state’s hard-knuckle approach to drug users is a dependence on private providers, needle exchange, and inadequate drug courts in some counties.

There are no silver bullets to extinguish this victimizer, but there are alternatives to reduce the damage. It is my belief that the more-effective methadone or the more-expensive, suboxone, would be a better treatment for heroin addiction. I quote: “Daily doses of methadone for 12 months have been recommended for recovery. Methadone helps reduce the craving of withdrawal from heroin. Taken once a day (under a city or state supervision) methadone eases opiate withdrawal for 24 to 36 hours, decreasing the chance of relapse.”

In my view, methadone or suboxone maintenance appears to be more cost-effective for the state, than the cost of lengthy jail and prison terms.

Seattle, Washington — according to a Nightline program on P.B.S. — has found that keeping heroin addicts out of jail and functioning in society by administering to them free and supervised, daily doses of methadone has been much easier on the public purse and more humane than incarcerating them. In so doing, Seattle gave addicts a chance to function outside of imprisonment, while coming to terms with their addiction. This maintenance can afford the recipient the chance to work and pay taxes.

A Google search showed only nine methadone clinics — not to be confused with the aforementioned treatment centers — for drug addiction in West Virginia, and they appear to be privately operated. If this proves to be true, with 55 counties and a state population of 1.8 million, those nine clinics are woefully inadequate. Heroin addicts live on the brink of devastation, so expecting them to travel far and pay for methadone treatment does not seem realistic. State-run clinics can reduce medical providers overprescribing methadone and suboxone to patients, as they have been known to do with opiates.

A daily dose issued by the state-run clinics can keep mothers from being separated from their children; it can enable fathers to hold down jobs; it can prevent addicts from dealing drugs and from robbing innocent victims to support their habits; it can put recalcitrant youths back on the right track; it can keep some babies from suffering severe withdrawal symptoms; and it can prevent many fatal heroin overdoses.

I believe the responsibility to establish methadone-treatment clinics falls upon state government — to give opiate addicts access to functional methadone or suboxone in each and every county; such an initiative will pay for itself by reducing the burden on the penal system and drug courts and their follow-up procedures.

Given that our state is currently in the grips of a huge budget deficit, saving money on jail and prison incarceration by keeping addicts out of prison, while more effectively combating the state’s drug-addiction quandary with methadone, would be a program worthy of implementation.

Sonny Fair

Wheeling

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