As the numbers of people dying from opioid overdoses continues to rise, healthcare workers, local officials, and state legislators are discussing ways to tackle the problem.
One of the approaches to treating people with Opioid Use Disorder is by using Medicine-Assisted Therapy, or MAT.
Margaret Greenwood Ericksen, an emergency medicine professor and health services researcher at the University of New Mexico, told the Legislative Finance Committee last Thursday about how MAT is used at UNM.
She said it can be used as a model for much wider acceptance of Medicine Assisted Therapy.
“There’s an enormous amount of interest within clinicians to treat Opioid Use Disorder / Substance Use Disorder because we see it destroy people's lives," said Greenwood Ericksen.
"We need dedicated treatment centers, of course, but also we want to simultaneously be integrating addiction medicine treatment across the health system and across general medical care. That reduces stigma and increases access.”
Those efforts appear to be having a impact, locally and nationally. A CDC study released last week indicates that for the first time opioids took hold in the 90s, accidental deaths from opioid use is going down.
In New Mexico, there’s been a six percent decrease, though the state has the sixth highest drug overdose rate in the nation. Fentanyl deaths in New Mexico spiked in 2019, then started stabilizing in 2022.
Among the reasons for improvement may be the slowly increasing use of medicine assisted therapy, new and in-development clinics, and the use of street medicine.
The latter refers to when physicians go in person to homeless encampments and other sites to provide MAT and other treatment.
Another remaining challenge, according to Wayne Lindstrom, deputy manager of Bernalillo County, is making sure that we aren’t letting youth slip through the cracks.
“The reality is that too often young people get in the back of the bus so to speak and the focus is so often on adult services," Lindstrom said.
"When it comes to behavioral crisis response, it's often been that same phenomonen and just as we build a crisis response system, one for adults we need to build as well one for youth."
Lindstrom is making some headway on that need in his own Bernalillo County, which just opened a new crisis triage center that has a youth intervention capability.
