Climate Disasters a Double Whammy for Former Opioid Addicts

For people in opioid addiction recovery, the crisis doesn't stop when natural disasters strike. In a piece written for KFF Health News and picked up by NPR, Andrew Jones follows 30-year-old Toni Brewer, who fled Hurricane Helene's destruction near Asheville, North Carolina, with just three days of Suboxone left—a brand of buprenorphine that quiets cravings and keeps her from relapsing. With clinics closed, communications down, and pharmacies short on stock, getting a refill required her to drive from the relatives she was staying with elsewhere in the state to Clayton, Georgia, to get her prescription filled; her North Carolina Medicaid didn't apply, so the normally nearly free medication cost her almost $130.

Four addiction-medicine physicians are now urging the government to help prevent stories like hers. Writing in the American Journal of Public Health, they argue that "climate-driven disasters expose systemic weaknesses in addiction treatment," noting that nearly a year after Helene, "infrastructure damage continued to impede access to care" and that "even outside of disaster contexts, access to medications for OUD remains far from ideal." Their proposed fixes: allow larger take-home supplies during emergencies, create interstate registries so evacuees can fill prescriptions, provide clinics with backup power, and loosen some federal dispensing rules when disasters hit.

Cordelia Stearns, one of the editorial's authors and the chief medical officer of a North Carolina health center, tells Jones her patients had to make their way across mountains and rivers to get buprenorphine post-Helene. "The things that my patients did to be able to access their bupe ... it was astonishing." Read the full story here.