It is no secret that the coronavirus pandemic isn’t the first health crisis Pennsylvania has faced in recent years.
Until a never-before-seen disease started to burn around the world last year, there was another epidemic that was discussed on an almost daily basis.
The opioid crisis has killed more than 766,000 people since 1999. Millions more have suffered the effects of addiction, survived overdoses, lost jobs, gone to jail, or had their families shattered by the drugs. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1.27 million are actively receiving medical treatment for their addiction.
A big part of treatment can be inpatient rehabilitation — when a patient stays in a facility to deal with the physical act of getting clean from opioids, the same way they might be hospitalized to get clean from an infection.
But what happens when that part is over? The infection patient can go home with little problem, not needing to adjust to being healthy again. The addiction patient often needs an extra step to relearn how to live without the dependence on the drugs — not unlike someone who breaks a hip and needs to spend time in physical therapy.
That requires halfway houses, the step between help and home that can be the difference between living with a chronic disease the same way a diabetic lives with a nonfunctioning pancreas and being crippled by an addiction that makes and breaks all the rules.
The problem is we need more recovery houses. There aren’t enough. Open beds need to be available as soon as people are ready to leave a treatment facility, but too often there is a waiting list.
”If we don’t provide them a way to do that, people end up homeless, or back in prison, or back in treatment,” William Stauffer, executive director of the Pennsylvania Recovery Organizations Alliance, told Spotlight PA.
An investigation from the statewide news organization found that despite a 2017 call from Gov. Tom Wolf for more oversight of recovery houses, that is not happening. The state had a June 2020 deadline to create a process to certify or license the facilities but missed it.
True, that date fell squarely in the middle of the state being overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic, but what was the excuse for the years leading up to it?
Addiction is a disease. The American Medical Association defines it that way. So does the American Psychiatric Association. So do doctors and hospitals and pharmacies and insurance companies.
But the state pays more attention to them. Doctors, nurses and pharmacists are licensed. Hospitals and nursing homes are inspected. Insurance companies even have an entire department of state government. So does drug and alcohol programming, incidentally, which makes it odd that an important cog in the recovery machine is neglected.
There are concerns that fees and licensing would make it too hard for recovery houses to operate. That seems like an easy hurdle to overcome as the state hasn’t been collecting those fees to date.
Recovery houses are needed. So is oversight of them. Just get it done already.
— The Tribune-Review/TNS
