#a broken system

If you're making enough to put food on your table, then consider yourself fortunate. Without exaggeration, there are millions going to bed tonight starving...

“Because there is no love you can throw on them, no hug big enough that will change the power of that drug; it is just beyond imagination how controlling and destructive it is.”

A BROKEN SYSTEM

“Only one in ten addicted Americans gets any treatment at all for [their] sustande use disorder—which is why there’s such a push for outpatient MAT and, increasingly, programs that divert the addicted from jail to treatment.”

“The more we talk about the [opioid] epidemic as an individual disease phenomenon or a moral failing, the easier it is to obfuscate and ignore the social and economic conditions that predispose certain individuals to addiction.”

“While [Dr. Marc] Fishman believed buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone were all imperfect solutions, they remain, scientifically speaking, the best death-prevention tools in the box … 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, Fishman argued.”

“If you want to keep people away from drugs and drug-related crime, you have to have rewarding activities. It’s work. It’s okay. It’s an emphasis on the kinds of activities and relationships that people build their lives around. 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.”