Will the Recovery Enhancement for Addiction Treatment Act Give Patients More Access to Rehab
A group of U.S. Senators have been in the news recently in connection with a new bill which is aimed at opening doors to treatment for more Americans suffering from drug addiction. Specifically, the bill is intended to address what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has described as America’s “deadly epidemic of prescription painkiller abuse.”
Around 17,000 people in the United States now die every year from overdosing on painkillers such as hydrocodone (Vicodin) and oxycodone (OxyContin), and nearly 500,000 people are being admitted to emergency rooms for complications involving these drugs. The bill is intended to strike a blow against this looming public health threat by expanding the access to treatment for addiction to opioid painkillers, in light of the fact that less than half of those who need treatment are currently getting it. In 2012, around 2.5 million people in the U.S. abused or were addicted to opioid medications, and fewer than 1 million received treatment. Senators Markey, Feinstein, Rockefeller, Brown and Hirono introduced the Recovery Enhancement for Addiction Treatment Act in the second session of the current meeting of Congress, using the acronym “TREAT Act.”
Unfortunately, the TREAT Act does not have as its purpose expanding access to drug rehab programs for opioid addicts. In fact, the words “rehab” and “rehabilitation” occur nowhere in the 14-page bill (which can be read in its entirety here). Instead, the bill is all about making it easier for addicts to receive opioid replacement therapy using drugs such as buprenorphine and methadone. This approach to treatment involves using one drug to substitute for another in a controlled effort to ease the person off the drug of addiction. The language used to introduce the bill to the public describes the overall goal of the proposed law:
Access to effective medicines to help treat opioid addiction in outpatient and primary care settings remains limited in part due to current federal restrictions. In order to address the epidemic of opioid overdoses, we need to expand the ability of trained medical professionals to provide effective medication-assisted therapies.
Currently, a physician cannot use buprenorphine or other drug replacement therapies to treat opioid addicts unless he or she has received a waiver from the government which allows the doctor to provide such treatment to no more than 30 patients in the first year, with the limit expanding to 100 in the following year. The TREAT Act sponsors hope to have this situation changed to allow physicians to treat 100 in the first year and an unlimited number in following years. Furthermore, they would see the right to treat as many as 100 patients in a year extended to qualified nurse practitioners and physician assistants. In summary, the purpose of the TREAT Act is to make it easier for doctors to use drug replacement therapy, but it doesn’t have anything to do with traditional inpatient drug rehab programs.
TREAT Act Focuses on Drug Replacement Therapy
The TREAT Act is deficient in its failure to account for the fact that recovery from addiction depends on more than getting over physical cravings for a drug. Opioid replacement therapy addresses only this aspect of the situation but does nothing to help the person handle the underlying problems that led him or her to abuse drugs in the first place. To make matters worse, it does not even give the person confidence that he or she has the ability to quit and give up drugs; it uses more drugs to treat the addiction. This is the opposite approach to the one taken at Narconon, an organization whose name communicates the principle of treating drug addiction without the use of other drugs. The TREAT Act is a positive development inasmuch as it is an attempt to address the massive problem of opioid drug abuse, but it falls short of providing a full and comprehensive solution by offering easier access to non-drug based rehab programs.
Source:
®