The five Massachusetts opioid treatment clinics where Ruth Potee works bend over backward to make methadone treatment easy and accessible for the people they serve. But Potee worries it isn’t enough.
The clinics have doctors on hand 12 hours a day to start new patients on methadone, which is considered the gold standard for opioid use disorder treatment. When possible, they send eligible patients home with the maximum number of take-home doses allowed under the law, rather than having them come to the clinic every day for supervised doses.
But not everyone is able to make the frequent trip to an opioid treatment center — a federal requirement that people with opioid use disorder must adhere to in order to receive methadone, a drug that can reduce the risk of overdose deaths by 50 percent.
