BURLINGTON, Vermont — A group of more than a dozen addiction care providers gathered at a community health center one morning in September for their monthly meeting, where they chatted about their latest thorny problem.
One of their patients had vanished. Again.
The missing man, a 28-year-old whom I’ll call Tyler, was never an easy patient. On and off, he had used two to eight bags of heroin each day for the past seven years. He was strongly resistant to medication-assisted treatment (MAT), in which patients use medications such as methadone or buprenorphine to stave off withdrawals and reduce cravings — widely considered the gold standard for opioid addiction care.
He also declined medications to treat the anxiety that had haunted him for much of his adult life, apparently due to concerns about sexual side effects. “It’s a big problem among the men,” one woman said. The others nodded in agreement.
[For more on this story by German Lopez, go to https://www.vox.com/policy-and...ic-vermont-hub-spoke]
Photo: The top of Church Street Market Place in Burlington, Vermont. Kainaz Amaria/Vox
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