Prisons aren’t linking people to adequate addiction treatment - and many are dying as a result.
Casey, who’s 36, was one of the beneficiaries of Rhode Island’s relatively new approach to treating opioid addiction in prisons and jails: It now provides the three main medications for opioid addiction to inmates within its facilities, with few strings attached. The three medications - buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone - are considered by experts to be the gold standard of care for opioid addiction, with studies showing that they reduce the all-cause mortality rate among opioid addiction patients by half or more and do a far better job of keeping people in treatment than non-medication approaches.