BALTIMORE — The latest disaster in Baltimore’s deadly and worsening opioid epidemic was a small one: The addiction treatment van, now 13 years old, wouldn’t start.
The white GMC truck, open four mornings a week and parked outside the city jail, is an attempt to close a gap in the city’s struggling addiction treatment system. But as the breakdown showed, even the attempts to plug holes in the system sometimes themselves have holes. With the van out of service, doctors and nurses took to their own cars to see patients, some of them already skeptical about getting treatment.
The cramped van, funded by private foundations and run by the Behavioral Health Leadership Institute, has a narrow hallway, a tiny kitchen, and two offices so small I could barely stretch my arms. It was back up and running by the time I visited, offering buprenorphine, one of the two medications considered the gold standard for opioid addiction treatment, to patients.
[For more on this story by German Lopez, go to https://www.vox.com/policy-and...-addiction-treatment]
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