In
a beige conference room in Morgantown, West Virginia, Katie Chiasson-Downs, a slight, blond woman with a dimpled smile, read out the good news first. “Sarah is getting married next month, so I expect her to be a little stressed,” she said to the room. “Rebecca is moving along with her pregnancy. This is Betty’s last group with us.”
“Felicia is having difficulties with doctors following up with her care for what she thinks is MRSA,” Chiasson-Downs continued. “Charlie wasn’t here last time, he cancelled. Hank ...”
“Hank needs a sponsor, bad,” said Carl Sullivan, a middle-aged man with auburn hair and a deep drawl. “It kind of bothers me that he never gets one.”
“This was Tom’s first time back in the group, he seemed happy to be there,” Chiasson-Downs went on, reading from her list.
“He had to work all the way back up,” Sullivan added.
Chiasson-Downs and the other therapists with the Chestnut Ridge Center’s opiate-addiction program had gathered to update each other on the status of their patients before launching into the day’s psychotherapy sessions. Here in West Virginia, where prescription painkillers have long “flowed like water,” as Sullivan said, the team works to keep recovering addicts sober through a combination of therapy and buprenorphine, a drug used to treat painkiller and heroin addiction.
[For more of this story, written by Olga Khazan, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/fea...oin-epidemic/382020/]
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