opioids

The State of Drug Checking in the United Kingdom

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A reagent drug testing kit

In a context where drug overdose deaths and other drug-related harms are on the rise, epidemiological evidence-backed harm reduction services including drug checking, drug consumption rooms, and needle exchanges are a crucial priority. In this post, Contributing Editor Juliet Flam-Ross describes the state of drug checking services in the UK.

Pharmacy stakeholders’ perceptions of opioid use disorder vaccines

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Editor’s Note: Amanda Pratt’s first contribution to our Pharmaceutical Inequalities series offers this insightful interview with Vincent Wartenweiler PharmD, an independent community pharmacist and Master’s student in Psychoactive Pharmaceutical Investigation at UW-Madison. Amanda (AP) and Vincent (VW) sat down on March 24, 2022 to discuss a qualitative project Vincent published in 2021 to determine perceptions of pharmacy stakeholders around opioid use disorder vaccines. In addition to providing a glimpse into a significant milestone for the history of alcohol, drugs and pharmacy–the development of substance use disorder vaccines–this interview sheds light on potential methodologies for understanding vaccine hesitancy. The Pharmaceutical Inequalities series is funded by the Holtz Center and the Evjue Foundation.

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Psychedelics in the treatment of substance use disorders: the case of ibogaine for the treatment of opioid dependence.

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Editor’s Note: This post by Anny Ortiz is the first in our Pharmaceutical Inequalities series. She explores the existing research landscape of psychedelics and then draws upon her own lived experience of working in a treatment center that offered ibogaine-assisted detoxification to discuss the affordances and unanswered questions of using psychedelics in treatment. The Pharmaceutical Inequalities series is funded by the Holtz Center and the Evjue Foundation.

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Call for Papers: International Forum on Drug Policy, 2022.

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The International Center for Drug Policy Studies at Shanghai University (ICDPS Shanghai) is pleased to announce the call for papers for the Second International Forum on Drug Policy, currently scheduled for June 7-9, 2022 in a hybrid format in Shanghai. The theme of the Second Forum will be ‘The Fentanyl and Other Synthetic Opioids Crises: New Challenges and New Responses’.

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An American Way of Working

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In Methadone: An American Way of Dealing, work is everywhere. Dayton, Ohio, the film’s primary location, is introduced to us as a “manufacturing community” beset by crime. These two types of work—factory and crime—come up again and again while we are in town. Straight work, at GM, or at a foundry, leads to getting high just to bear it, to “paint over the factory,” as one young worker puts it, and get through another soul-killing shift. Staying in the plant and getting by on methadone instead is tough. We meet only one worker doing this; he is trying to taper off and not making it, missing shifts for the first time because he feels so low.  We meet many workers who have chosen to stay outside the factory, period, and stay high all the time. They claim they are living a better, more real life than their fathers did, trooping into factories every day with their coveralls and lunchboxes, “sheep” meekly accepting their slaughter.  As the film notes, with its passing shots of street preachers and sex shows, the straight life is studded with its own addictive consolations. Dayton, we are told, has “1000 bars and just one [methadone] clinic.” 

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Methadone: An American Way of Thinking

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In 1976, the East German government stole and repurposed for its own broadcasts a copy of Julia Reichert’s and James Klein’s documentary film, Methadone: An American Way of Dealing. The theft was clumsy, almost unabashedly so, in the way that GDR intrusions often could be. Reichert and Klein had submitted the film for consideration in the 19th annual Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, but it was rejected for having been delivered to the committee after the deadline. When the film print was returned to the directors, it obviously had been cut and only partially reassembled. The original reels on which it had left the U.S. were gone, replaced by film cores. The leaders (the length of cellulose attached to the beginning or end of a film to assist the projectionist) were in German, not English. To add insult to injury, the package arrived with an exorbitant bill for cash-on-delivery shipping. 

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“I envision the methadone clinic as we now know it disappearing”: The promises and failures of methadone and LAAM

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I’ve watched Methadone: An American Way of Dealing five times now. Each time, I’m taken aback by how skillfully directors Julia Reichert and James Klein present this moment—a period of peak tension in the addiction treatment community. By 1974, when the film was released, the early promises of methadone were butting up, often painfully, against the era’s difficult realities. Through interviews with patients at the Dayton, Ohio, Bureau of Drug Abuse clinic (BUDA) at the center of the film, Reichert and Klein make it clear that methadone, once hailed as the solution to the decade’s twin problems of addiction and crime, couldn’t overcome the era’s other issues: deindustrialization, Vietnam, and America’s trends toward atomization and its concomitant political right turn. 

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Telling Methadone Stories: Men in Ties

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Time has a way of turning lived experience into memory and from then into stories that seem, by turns, improbable and fantastical (yes, kids, I used a typewriter to prepare my college research papers!). In the improbable category, one might include my attendance at the Yale School of Medicine’s conference marking the centennial of heroin, held in New Haven from September 18-20, 1998. Organized by the late David Musto, billed as a sweeping review of the heroin’s past and present, it lives in my memory as reunion of Nixon administration drug policy alumni. Egil “Bud” Krogh was there, handing out copies of his short volume The Day Elvis Met Nixon, which described in detail the culturally resonant meeting that Krogh helped arrange (a meeting in which the King asked the President for a federal drug enforcement badge). Daniel Patrick Moynihan was there, delivering an opening-night address that embarrassed some of us younger historians in the audience with its confident declaration that no one had heard of a drug problem back in his childhood days. And, of course, the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP) was well-represented, with both of its Directors—Jerry Jaffe and Bob DuPont—in attendance and giving presentations. In between the addresses and presentations—for which junior folks like myself had been invited to offer commentaries—they told stories, especially methadone stories. 

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