Breaking the opioid-addiction chain

There is no doubt that the opioid epidemic, which has been building in the U.S. for the past two decades, is a public health crisis. But after a slow start, public health efforts are targeting this issue at the local, state and federal levels.

Missouri has prioritized expanding access to life-saving medications naloxone (marketed as Narcan) — a drug that reverses the deadly effects of an overdose — and buprenorphine and methadone, two medications aimed at taming opioid cravings. To increase access to treatment, the state also contracts with drug-treatment centers that provide counseling aimed at breaking addiction. Unfortunately, however, most treatment centers do not fully use these evidence-based medication approaches, nor do they publicly report their patients’ treatment outcomes. So their effectiveness is largely unknown.