The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘Playing catch-up’ on opioids
Doctors slow to adopt drug-aided therapy
William Evans grew up in Brookfield, a high school tennis player from a family with an Ivy League pedigree. By the time he was working at his first job after college, he was addicted to opioids, spending $25,000 in less than a year and driving to Philadelphia twice a week to buy drugs on the street.
Now 37, Evans hasn’t used illegal drugs since 2006. He is married and has a 3-year-old daughter, a home in Trumbull, and a sales job at a software company. He attributes his sobriety to counseling and medication to treat his addiction.
“It’s allowed me to live a life,” he said.
Research shows that medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, for opioid addiction is effective because it eliminates drug cravings, but the use of MAT in Connecticut is not keeping up with the epidemic, said Dr. David Fiellin, director of the Yale Program in
Addiction Medicine, who works with the state to address the opioid crisis.
“We are, at some level, playing catch-up,” Fiellin said. “I think it’s going to take, unfortunately, a number of years” to meet the need for MAT in the state, he said.
The need and treatment gaps
Connecticut ranks in the top 10 of states with the highest rates of fatal opioid overdoses, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, which said the state rate more than quadrupled from 5.7 deaths per 100,000 people in 2012 to 24.5 in 2016. In 2017, 1,038 people died of opioid overdoses in Connecticut, up from 729 in 2015 and 917 in 2016, state medical examiner figures show.
There are no “reliable estimates” of the number of Connecticut residents with opioid use disorder, Fiellin said. Roughly 2 million people are addicted to opioids in the U.S., with 72,000 fatalities in 2017, according to preliminary figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Three drugs have federal approval for treatment of opioid use disorder. They are methadone, administered only in federally regulated sites; buprenorphine, for which medical professionals must be trained before prescribing; and naltrexone, for which training isn’t required, but is in limited use because patients must be drug-free for seven days before taking it.
Addressing opioid addiction with medication-assisted treatment reduces overdoses, illicit drug use, cases of HIV and criminal behavior, Fiellin said. The practice is endorsed by federal health agencies and the state government. Advocates contend that since OUD is a chronic brain disease, it should be treated with medication as other diseases are.
About 3,800 practitioners are licensed in Connecticut to prescribe buprenorphine, according to federal figures provided by the state Department of Consumer Protection. That number includes doctors, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants who work in private practices, emergency rooms, health clinics and substance abuse facilities.
But state and local health officials say there’s a dearth of primary care physicians who treat opioid use disorder with MAT. Also, few residential treatment programs use MAT, opting for no-medication, an approach that increases overdose risk after discharge, Fiellin said.
Private practitioners in addiction care are mainly psychiatrists and addiction specialists, not primary care doctors, experts say.
Dr. J. Craig Allen, medical director at Rushford, which operates addiction and mental health services at facilities across the state, has conducted buprenorphine training but says, “There are so few people actually prescribing the medication.” He said the “challenging behaviors” of people with OUD can deter primary care physicians.
But not Dr. Peter Rostenberg, of New Fairfield, a primary care doctor and internist who has been using MAT since 2003. He has prescribed Suboxone, a brand name of buprenorphine, to some 500 patients. As part of their treatment, he requires them to attend group therapy. “Isolation is addiction and socialization is recovery,” Rostenberg said.
Rostenberg, who received a federal award for his OUD treatment, said his typical patients come to him “in desperation,” often after being unsuccessful in residential abstinence programs. Generally, after taking buprenorphine, they “flourish in life,” he said. “They feel really good because they are losing that craving.”
Emergency departments in 11 acute care hospitals and VA Connecticut Healthcare now prescribe buprenorphine, which also eases withdrawal symptoms. In the first four months of 2018, there were at least 3,090 ER visits for suspected drug overdoses among CT residents, the state Public Health Department reports.
Of the state’s 19 correctional facilities, two prisons and three jails provide methadone treatment, with a fourth jail to be added within six months. In 2016, 52 percent of fatal opioid overdose victims were incarcerated at some point, according to the state Department of Correction. Dr. Kathleen Maurer, the agency addiction services director, said the department’s treatment efforts, limited by finances, is “a work in progress.”
Outpatient clinics in New Haven and New Britain offer MAT to newly released inmates with OUD and physical and mental illnesses.
Fiellin said treatment gaps are statewide, but are most acute in northwestern and northeastern Connecticut. Even in cities with several treatment options, there is not a sufficient mix of services, which can mean long waits, inadequate hours of operation and insurance hurdles, he said.
About 50 percent of the people being treated for OUD are covered by Medicaid, 30 percent by private insurance, and the rest either have no insurance or are covered by federal veterans’ benefits, Fiellin said.
Lauren Siembab, MAT director for the state Department of Mental Health