ON A sweltering morning, a motley crowd queues at the BAART Beverly clinic near downtown Los Angeles to receive methadone treatment for their heroin and prescription-opioid addictions. An older Latino man in a car-dealership uniform checks his Apple watch while a clinic worker measures his dose of pink liquid methadone into a plastic cup. He gulps the medicine down as one might take a tequila shot. As she leaves the clinic, a thin blue-haired woman wearing a sailor’s cap gushes to another patient about how taking methadone has allowed her to kick her heroin habit and save money. “I have a cellphone now. Do you have a cellphone?”
An increase in overdoses from prescription and illicit opioids, such as heroin and fentanyl, means that deaths caused by drugs exceed those from car accidents and firearms. Methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone are the three medicines that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat opioid...Continue reading
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