AT Forum provides news for opioid treatment programs & their patients. OTPs care includes the three federally approved medications for opioid use disorder.
"Give people housing, Give people mental supports. Give people universal basic income. This [treatment] cannot be reformed." @Kassandra_Fred at #AMERSA2022
"If you combine treatment and imprisonment, treatment doesn’t shape the imprisonment, prison shapes the treatment." @Kassandra_Fred in spicy debate at #AMERSA2022
It's not money or stigma that prevents most people from going to treatment. It's: "The neuroadaptation that says I cannot live peacefully without these drugs, and therefore I refuse any attempt by your part to save my life, my children." @madras_bertha rebuttal at #AMERSA2022.
"If care and control are equated, you can't expect people to come to you" for help. @Kassandra_Fred in spicy debate on mandated treatment at #AMERSA2022
There is not only one kind of mandated treatment: there is quality treatment, prison, or the awful Chinese neurosurgeon who ablated nucleus accumbens of 600 people with addiction. @madras_bertha in #spicydebate at #AMERSA2022
"First a person takes the drug, then the drug takes the person." @madras_bertha at #AMERSA2022 after listing many areas where she and @Kassandra_Fred agree (human life is paramount, SUD has consequences for family members and others, mandated tx is not for everyone.
From @honoraenglander at #AMERSA2022: One in five -- some hospitals one in four -- hospitalized patients has an SUD. These patients don't go for tx for #addiction, they go because severely ill. But hospitals need to be open to their needs and never stigmatize.
Watch ATForum newsletter for story on how bridge clinic in Boston uses 72-hour rule to get patients into #OTP. #BayMark. It requires moving fast, and cooperating hospital. A model for the nation. (72 hour rule is 20 years old, but hospitals have resisted.) #methadone#AMERSA22
Today at #AMERSA2022 the annual "spicy debate" is between @Kassandra_Fred of @DrugPolicyNerds and @madras_bertha of Oregon Health and Science University on whether mandated treatment systems should be "abolished" or "adjusted." This should be 🔥