foster care (though 2 of the 37 eventually landed in foster care); Andruscavage and Ramsey data. Babies typically wean off their low doses of methadone within three months.
Many have been stigmatized: Author interview, Ramsey.
Access to MAT in Virginia: Author interviews, Melton and Department of Medical Assistance Services director Kate Neuhausen, July 27, 2017.
As a work-around to the Republicans’ refusal: Author interview, Neuhausen.
“When calling facilities there is rarely”: Text to author from Patricia Mehrmann, Oct. 5, 2017.
most families to continue navigating: Author interview, psychologist and Hope Initiative volunteer Cheri Hartman, Aug. 8, 2017.
“Their treatment is a video playing”: Author interview, Missy Carter, June 20, 2017.
(Nationally, roughly half of drug courts): According to the National Drug Court Institute, 56 percent of drug courts allowed MAT, 2016: ndci/resources/training/medication-assisted-treatment/.
“abusing it every which way”: Author interview, Lebanon police chief Mark Mitchell, May 4, 2016.
“a wonderful medicine, but we were seeing”: Author interview, pharmacist and professor Sarah Melton, July 24, 2017.
several of the nation’s top buprenorphine prescribers: Using data from a ProPublica study of Medicaid reimbursements in 2013, John Ramsey, “Clinic Operators See Benefits of Careful Suboxone Use,” Richmond Times Dispatch, Aug. 6, 2016.
Buprenorphine is the third-most-diverted opioid: Sally Satel, “Taking On the Scourge of Opioids,” National Affairs, Summer 2017: 13.
She texted me: Author interview, Patricia Mehrmann, Sept. 3, 2017.
“no one wants to tell Prince”: Monthly meeting of NAS policy board, Roanoke Memorial Hospital, Kim Ramsey, May 11, 2017.
The FBN framed methadone: Multiple interviews about the history of addiction maintenance drugs with historian Nancy D. Campbell, August and September 2017. Campbell and Anne M. Lovell, “The History of the Development of Buprenorphine as an Addiction Therapeutic,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, February 2012: 124–39.
“pharmacologically perfect solution”: Campbell and Lovell, “The History of the Development of Buprenorphine,” citing the researcher P. F. Renault from 1978. First use of Vivitrol in jails in Barnstable County, MA, according to Tina Rosenberg, “Medicines to Keep Addiction Away,” New York Times, Feb. 16, 2016. Aggressive marketing of Vivitrol, with sales going from $30 million in 2011 to $209 million in 2016: Jake Harper, “To Grow Market Share, a Drugmaker Pitches Its Product to Judges,” NPR, Aug. 3, 2017.
While methadone remained on the fringes: Campbell and Lovell, “The History of the Development of Buprenorphine.”
20 percent of returning Vietnam veterans: Lee N. Robins, “The Sixth Thomas James Okey Memorial Lecture: Vietnam Veterans’ Rapid Recovery from Heroin Addiction: A Fluke or Normal Expectation?,” Addiction, August 1993.
The battle lines over MAT: My op-ed on the MAT controversy, “Addicted to a Treatment for Addiction,” New York Times, May 28, 2016.
In 2016, not long after a Kentucky appeals court: The shift of Kentucky drug courts to allow MAT was prompted by a Huffington Post investigation by journalist Jason Cherkis, “Kentucky Reforms Drug Court Rules to Let Heroin Addicts Take Prescribed Meds,” April 17, 2015.
Price disappointed treatment advocates: Harper, “Price’s Remarks on Opioid Treatment Were Unscientific and Damaging, Experts Say,” NPR, May 16, 2017.
“She worked on him in a hurry”: Author interview, Dr. Steve Loyd, Tennessee’s assistant commissioner for Substance Abuse Services, Aug. 25, 2017.
resigned a few months later: Juliet Eilperin, Amy Goldstein, and John Wagner, “HHS Secretary Tom Price Resigns Amid Criticism for Taking Charter Flights at Taxpayer Expense,” Washington Post, Sept. 29, 2017.
signaled the administration would significantly expand: Sheila Kaplan, “F.D.A. to Expand Medication-Assisted Therapy for Opioid Addicts,” New York Times, Feb. 25, 2018.
Graduates are roughly a half to a third less likely: National Association of Drug Court Professionals, as cited in Satel, “Taking On the Scourge,”17.
“We’ve had thirteen babies born”: Author interview, Tazewell County drug court judge Jack Hurley, April 20, 2016.
“The best research says counseling doesn’t help”: Author interview, counselor Anne Giles, Sept. 8, 2016. Giles was referring to a British study on 150,000 patients showing that people in abstinence-only care had double the death rate of those who received ongoing MAT, though that study doesn’t compare MAT-only with MAT with counseling: Matthias Pierce et al., “Impact of Treatment for Opioid Dependence on Fatal Drug-Related Poisoning: A National Cohort Study in England,” Addiction, February 2016.
“although some benefit is seen even with low dose and minimum support”: Research on opioid-substitution protocols: John Strang et al., “Drug Policy and the Public Good: Evidence for Effective Interventions,” Lancet, Jan. 7, 2012.
only cash because Medicaid reimbursements were: Author interview, Giles, Sept. 8, 2016. Reimbursements improved in Virginia in April 2017, under new regulations meant to nudge cash-only clinics toward adopting best practices; author interview, Dr. Hughes Melton.
He’d lost his twenty-six-year-old son: Author interview, Don Flattery,