Monday, July 21, 2025

Helping meth users quit, by paying them

 The NYT has the story:

Upended by Meth, Some Communities Are Paying Users to Quit
Unlike with opioids, there is no medication to suppress cravings for meth and other stimulants. As use soars, hundreds of clinics are trying a radically different a
pproach.   By Jan Hoffman

“Give me something that’s going to help me with this,” she begged her doctor.

“There is nothing,” the doctor replied.

"Overcoming meth addiction has become one of the biggest challenges of the national drug crisis. Fentanyl deaths have been dropping, in part because of medications that can reverse overdoses and curb the urge to use opioids. But no such prescriptions exist for meth, which works differently on the brain.

...

"Lacking a medical treatment, a growing number of clinics are trying a startlingly different strategy: To induce patients to stop using meth, they pay them.

...

"Even those who are uncomfortable with the general concept are starting to come around, said Dr. Sally Satel, medical director at a methadone clinic in Washington, D.C., and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Most people recoil at paying people to do the right thing,” she said. “But we’ve got plenty of data that shows this works. So I think we just have to bite the utilitarian bullet.”

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