At a downtown Denver clinic, 30 patients addicted to opioids are prescribed a daily combination pill that reduces drug cravings and, at the same time, ruins any attempt to get high.
The drug, buprenorphine-naloxone, is expected to become more widely available in Colorado thanks to a $2.9 million federal grant announced Thursday for 17 health centers in the state, part of a nationwide effort to attack the opioid epidemic.
Federal Health Resources and Services Administration officials announced the grants at the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless clinic on the north side of downtown, praising the coalition’s “medication-assisted treatment” clinic. Patients receive buprenorphine-naloxone prescriptions, along with mental-health and substance abuse therapy, often while living in a nearby shelter.
The buprenophine reduces cravings and the naloxone, an opioid antedote used by paramedics and relatives of drug users, prevents patients from getting high should they relapse. The pill combo is less potent than methadone and carries less stigma because patients can fill the prescription at a pharmacy and take it at home instead of going to a methadone clinic.
The coalition’s clinic soon will have two additional health workers who have the required Drug Enforcement Agency approval to prescribe the drug, which is covered for the needy by Medicaid but costs about $400 per month through some physicians’ offices. Coalition psychiatric director Dr. Elizabeth Cookson, who has been the clinic’s sole prescriber of buprenophine-naloxone, said she has never seen as many coalition clients and former drug addicts returning to work — “folks who are homeless and on the streets using heroin who within a month have a job.”
Only 15 percent of people who try to quit opioids, including heroin or oxycodone, without medication are successful, Cookson said.
The coalition will receive $175,000 in federal funding, similar to 16 other clinics in the state, including in Lamar, Alamosa and Olathe.
Brenda Todd, who was homeless for 10 years and addicted to crack cocaine, now lives in a condo and has reconnected with her family after getting sober with help from the coalition’s Stout Street Health Center. She’s been sober for seven years and still attends therapy through the program.
“Even though I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror, they still helped me,” she said. “Drugs make you mentally unstable. They change who you are, the things you do. I didn’t know who I was hurting until I sat down and got sober.”
Todd said the first three days after quitting crack were the worst, and there is no drug similar to the one that helps those addicted to opioids. She walked into the health center seven years ago because she was “sick and tired of being homeless and tired of using and abusing.”
The grants in Colorado were part of more than $200 million to 1,178 health centers across the country.
“No corner of our country, from rural areas to urban centers, has escaped the scourge of the opioid crisis,” Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said in a release announcing the funds.
