Overcoming urban development division to treat substance abuse

By Tracy Nguyen, special for Calmatters

This comment was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

Imagine driving 75 miles once every day because your life depends on it.

It was the case with the residents of Reading, in Shasta County, who needed to treat a disorder of substance abuse. They had no choice but to drive to Chico, in Butt.

In urban areas, they would at least have a chance to fight. But in rural California – there is no such luck. In the rural California, Opioid -related death coefficientSometimes even tripled, the average percentage in urban counties.

In the past year Mobile Drug Product Treatment Program throughout the country where mobile units travel to rural communities and provide Treatment with the help of medicine to people with violation of the use of opioids.

Instead of limiting treatment only to mobile units and to the accidental facility located in more city areas, California should expand the treatment assisted by medicine through “medicinal units” in rural communities.

Med units are satellite offices of primary clinics licensed to treat recovery patients.

While mobile drug treatment program does excellent work to directly provide a vulnerable population by removing transport and costs, it is unrealistic to believe that mobile units can effectively relate to hundreds of thousands of rural Californians who who who who who suffer from opioid dependence.

Practically speaking, mobile units allow only one patient to be monitored at one time, greatly restricting how many patients can be treated in one place.

There are also not enough clinics or facilities that offer treatment assisted by medicine in the rural California. For example, in the village district of Butt, which has one of the The highest percentages associated with opioids In the state the county has only A single facility in Chico This offers treatment assisted by medicine.

Instead of forcing long distances of patients, state and local authorities should coordinate to expand MED units to more rural areas.

In Reading, after a long -time approval process, eventually County Shasta build a honey unitTermination of travel hours for patients. The clinic has grown so quickly that it has eventually become its office within a few years. Now it is more than the Chico facility.

With sufficient time and funding, these meadows will reassure the recovery patients that treatment assisted by the drug is here to stay and that there is support for patients if they want.

The bigger question can be how the state plans to pay for it.

With $ 1 billion already invested in the Governor Newsom Main plan to deal with the opioid crisisFinding any change in the pocket in the budget will be difficult. This is not mentioned by the long and difficult bureaucratic challenges of approving new health and local madrays.

But it is worth the effort if we take into account how much support for people in recovery leads to the improvement of health and well -being in our communities.

It will ease tension emergency services And it reduces the number of visits to hospital emergency wards due to opioid overdose, thus reducing healthcare costs.

It will also reinstal the patients in the workforce, thus Unemployment And reading the welfare programs.

Where does the Trump administration fit into this? Given that President Donald Trump is focused on reducing “waste”, it can be argued that the last thing we need is an increase in costs, especially if we have other priorities that depend on California Cooperation with the Federal GovernmentS

However, we cannot reject the state’s responsibility to protect Californians from all dangers and threats, including impersonal ones. If the state does not pursue the expansion of medicine -assisted treatment, then California will be complicit or responsible for life lost by the opioid crisis.

When the opioid epidemic hits, he leaves no mercy – not to his victims and certainly not to their friends and families.

While as a whole treatment and abuse of medication in general remain stigmatized – Especially in rural communities – we cannot be distracted by the abuse of harm of the substance perpetuates.

The search for addiction help should not be difficult, 75 miles away.

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.