Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • When an Iowa Family Doctor Takes On the Opioid Epidemic

    Primary care practioners are prescribing buprenorphine to patients struggling with opioid substance use disorder, providing a support for medication-assisted recovery. Practices use a team-based approach and grant funding to provide this support and overcome the challenges of limited staff capacity and insufficient reimbursement.

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  • Prescribing Opioids: How Many Are Too Many?

    Doctors at Johns Hopkins and Rutgers New Jersey Medical School are striving to establish new guidelines that are specific to surgical procedure and patient circumstance for prescribing opioids. The general consensus is this: every patient's needs must be assessed individually, alternatives to opiates should always be considered first, and no patients with acute pain should ever be sent home with more than a few days' worth of opiates.

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  • Beyond Books: How Libraries Are the Latest Front in the Opioid Fight

    Librarians across the nation are being trained to administer naloxone, a drug that can reverse an opioid overdose. In Denver’s Central Library, 350 staff members were trained to administer the drug. “Libraries in New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Salt Lake County, Utah, among others, are also stocking the overdose reversal drug.”

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  • The Opioid Solution

    Although the opioid epidemic has spread across America, this story argues that local solutions are needed. In Allentown, when somebody overdoses on opioids, they get a visit from a Blue Guardian, a trained volunteer that connects the individual to treatment. The outreach program also focuses on reaching out to the families of addicts. In 2017, the program aided nearly 1,000 addicts to get treatment.

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  • ‘The Police Aren't Just Getting You In Trouble. They Actually Care.'

    Police departments across eastern Massachusetts frustrated by the rising opioid epidemic decided to make themselves avenues to treatment rather than instruments of punishment. “It was pretty evident that we weren’t arresting our way out of anything.” The idea evolved into a national program called the Police-Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative with nearly 400 police departments helping thousands of people access drug treatment services across the country.

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  • Opioid Crisis Compels New York to Look North for Answers

    Supervised injection sites in Canada have prevented hundreds of heroin overdose deaths. Now, New York City is looking to follow Canada's lead with a city-wide initiative to establish safe injection sites. While the Trump Administration is not in support of such sites, experts believe that it is unlikely that the federal government would interfere with a site if a city is in support of it.

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  • How one rural California county went from the state's highest rate of opioid deaths — to zero

    Plumas County had one of the highest rates of opioid deaths in the state of California. So, 24 coalitions banded together and formed an umbrella group in order to address the problem. “Plumas County went from having the highest rate of overdoses in California to the lowest.”

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  • Reversing an Overdose

    A significant spike in opioid-related overdose deaths in Philadelphia has resulted in more people in the community carrying Naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal medication. Thanks to a standing order signed by the Pennsylvania physician general as well as a local health insurance company, obtaining the drug has been made much easier which in turn results in more lives potentially being saved.

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  • Instagram's Queer Appalachia brings love — and services — to those who need it most

    The Queer Appalachia Instagram account has created a virtual community combating the isolation and fear that are often present in the lives of queer people living in Appalachia. In a region particularly hard-hit by the opioid crisis, it has also created a network of sponsors for those in recovery through a telehealth program managed by the account.

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  • We really do have a solution to the opioid epidemic — and one state is showing it works

    In order to tackle opioid addiction, the state of Virginia found a way to make drug treatment accessible to people with medicaid by boosting “reimbursement rates to addiction treatment providers.” Historically, drug treatment hasn’t been covered by health insurance. Virginia is changing that. Already, “the percent of Medicaid members with an opioid use disorder who received treatment went up by 29 percent from April to December 2017 compared to the same period the previous year.”

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