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| Opioid Addicts Offered Methadone Treatment In Prison Much More Likely To Seek Out Drug Abuse Treatment Once They're Released |
| By medicaldaily.com- Ed Cara |
| Published: 05/29/2015 |
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The measure of how fair a society is often said to be found in how they treat the least sympathetic of their lot. In the United States, there are few groups less sympathetic than our prisoners and drug addicts, especially when they’re one and the same. And according to a new study in The Lancet, we’re measuring up vastly short in the fairness department, at least when it comes to providing the best medical care to those who enter our jails with addiction. The study found that prisoners who continue preexisting methadone treatment in jail are much more likely to resume drug rehabilitation after their release than those who are weaned off methadone. Unfortunately, as the authors note, most of the country’s jails currently adhere to the latter practice. The largest randomized trial of its kind, the authors studied 223 volunteers from the Rhode Island Department of Corrections who had been enrolled in methadone maintenance therapy (MMT) prior to their sentence. Each volunteer was meant to stay in prison for no more than six months, with half of them being assigned to continuous MMT, while the other half followed the standard — in Rhode Island — protocol of being given decreasing doses of methadone until they were off it entirely. Methadone is a synthetic opioid whose daily use is advocated as a method to cope with the intensive symptoms of craving and withdrawal from other more addictive opioids like heroin and morphine. Read More. |
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