EXTRA: The Opioid Tragedy — How We Got Here | Freakonomics Radio

An update of our 2020 series, in which we spoke with physicians, researchers, and addicts about the root causes of the crisis — and the tension between abstinence and harm reduction. FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bKm0cf

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. We just finished a two-part series that looked at the very long-lasting opioid crisis. It's horrible. It's absolutely horrifying. We learned why the opioid epidemic has endured, and we learned about the billions of dollars in settlement money and how that should be used. Don't spend any money on anything some other funding stream covers. Today, we wanted to play for you a bonus episode. This is an update of a piece we published in early 2020, a piece that was also about the opioid crisis. As you will hear, the crisis seemed to be leveling off back then, but as it turned out, it wasn't. It continued to worsen, especially during the pandemic, although there are signs

• 0:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  that now it really is leveling off. In this episode, we spoke with some University of Pennsylvania physicians about an addiction treatment that they thought should be universal.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  They can get it as part of routine medical care, just like they might get their insulin for their diabetes or their blood pressure medicine.

• 1:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  So is this treatment now universal?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  That's, that's probably a no.

• 1:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  You'll also hear a bit more from Stephen Lloyd, the Tennessee physician who was featured in our new series. And stick around to the end of this episode for an update on the team at Penn Medicine. As always, thank you for listening.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 1:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jean Marie Perron is a professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  I'm an emergency medicine physician and a medical toxicologist, which means I was trained in poisonings and overdoses. And more recently, I've started to do addiction medicine work.

• 2:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Perron has seen the opioid crisis up close as a researcher and practitioner.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  So we have about 1,000 or 1,200 patients who visited our three hospitals last year, and about 400 of them were overdoses.

• 2:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Have you ever used opioids of any sort?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  No. Had a couple of kids, and broke my leg, and broke my wrist. I didn't have opioids for any of those three things.

• 2:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Were you offered in any case?

• 2:38Speaker 01

  I broke my leg in Canada, interestingly, I would say, right in the middle of the opioid crisis. And they'd said, you know, "Do you need anything?" And I said, you know, "I'm fine with ibuprofen."

• 2:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Skiing?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Mountain biking. But anyway, I would-

• 2:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you brought it on yourself?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  I did bring it on myself. But I would definitely say that I would have a super high threshold for anyone in my family, anyone I know. I mean, I advise against it sort of across the board.

• 3:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because it's just too easy to...

• 3:05Speaker 01

  It's just that you just don't need to go there.

• 3:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  So opioid deaths in the US have leveled off, maybe started to decline a little bit. What are you seeing here in Philadelphia?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  So they did decline a little bit. I think what is important about the national data is that the deaths that have declined the most are the oral pills. And that's probably the result of de-prescribing, and a little bit of a result of prescription drug monitoring programs preventing the co-prescribing of benzodiazepines with opioids, maybe a little bit more public awareness, like, "I shouldn't drink when I'm taking back pain medication."

• 3:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Another potential driver of this slight decline in deaths is the widespread availability of Narcan, an emergency nasal spray of the drug naloxone, which can stop an overdose as it's happening, wherever it's happening. Perone has administered Narcan herself a few times. The most recent was riding the subway home in Philadelphia after a night out.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  And somebody called and said, does anyone have Narcan? There's a man down and I do carry Narcan. And so I ran five or six subway cars up and there was a man on the ground. Getting CPR was blue cyanotic, was pulseless, really on the brink of death or defined as dead already, maybe. And so we continued CPR. I got my Narcan out. I gave him one dose and he didn't really respond. And then I gave him another dose. And then I thought, you know, we needed to do mouth to mouth. And then I thought, maybe some of the Narcan was still stuck in his nose. And so I sort of scribbled his nose a little bit and kind of irritated him a little bit more. And then he took like one teeny tiny breath. And over the course of the next, you know, 90 seconds, he started to wake up.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  And then about 10 minutes later EMS came. I was like, you guys just saved this guy's life.

• 4:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're saying you guys, but you were the one that came with Narcan.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Well, no, but they had started CPR. They had called someone for help. They had called 911. I mean, they had done so much. You know, we simulate resuscitations like that in the hospital. And this group of, you know, people just got it all together, did all the right thing. So it was really impressive. I mean, it was probably 25 or 30 people at the end of it all. And it was like this amazing, I call it my Philly moment because it was like winning the Super Bowl when everyone was in the streets and everyone just had this amazing bond. And it was just, it was incredible. It brought tears to my eyes then and it brings tears to my eyes when I talk about it.

• 5:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that story had a happy ending. Many overdose stories do not, and Narcan can only do so much. It doesn't treat the underlying addiction.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  The patients who come to the emergency department after receiving Narcan from an overdose, about 6% of them are dead at the end of one year and 10% of them are dead at the end of two years. So there is no other medical condition that we currently treat in the emergency department that has that kind of mortality.

• 5:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  So from your perspective, I'm curious, you're an ER doc and people come in for help when they're in a desperate state already, right? They're not typically coming to you to say, I've been thinking long and hard about my life and I want to make a graduated change, right? So what can you do for them? What was the treatment, let's say, five years ago when the problem was starting to really turn into a horror? And how does the treatment differ now?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  So that's a great question. Five years ago, an overdose patient hopefully got some compassion in the emergency department and a little bit of a conversation about why they may have overdosed that day, or what we can do to help them. Maybe as of four or three years ago, they would have been discharged with a box of Narcan or naloxone, so that if they were exposed to another overdose, somebody could use that on them, or they could use it on a friend or colleague. I think, fast-forwarding from there, what we've realized is that giving them kind of a crumpled piece of paper that said, "You should stop using drugs," doesn't really work. They are in a cycle of using and fighting withdrawal every three or four hours. And so that doesn't lend itself to getting your phone out and making an appointment for Monday morning to see an addiction specialist.

• 7:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  This appointment model was failing in other hospitals, too.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  We were on the front lines, just seeing patients being brought in, sometimes being just dropped off at the door and thrown at the emergency personnel.

• 7:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Gail D'Onofrio.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  I am professor and chair of emergency medicine at the Yale School of Medicine.

• 7:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  She is also chief of emergency services at Yale New Haven Health. So like Perron, D'Onofrio is a practitioner and a researcher.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  So our study in JAMA in 2015 was looking at different models of care for opiate use disorder.

• 7:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  JAMA is the Journal of the American Medical Association. And in 2015, ER practitioners like D'Onofrio weren't having much success treating the many opioid addicts they'd started to see. So she and her team set up a study. It included 300 patients, divided into three treatment groups. In the first group...

• 8:05Speaker 03

  We'll try to motivate them to get care, and then we'll refer them to the centers of care that we had here at Yale, or in the community.

• 8:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  This was the standard treatment at the time, the crumpled piece of paper model that Jean Marie Perron mentioned. The second group of D'Onofrio's patients got a bit extra.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  They got motivational enhancement, which we call the brief negotiation interview.

• 8:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was a 15-minute conversation, talking about their addiction and the circumstances that led to it.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  And then those people got a facilitator referral.

• 8:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Not just a crumpled piece of paper.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  So we actually called the place ourselves, and if it was at night, we'd call them in the morning and said, "We refer this person to you."

• 8:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then the third group.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  They got also a motivational enhancement, brief intervention, but then they were started on buprenorphine.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  So buprenorphine is a opioid agonist, which means it activates the opioid receptor, just like heroin and oxycodone.

• 9:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jean Marie Perron again.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  I think everyone knows methadone, and methadone is our historically opioid agonist treatment that we use for patients with opioid use disorder and the only treatment we really had for a long time.

• 9:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  But methadone has issues.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Methadone is dispensed from federal treatment programs and the patient has to go there every single day to get their dose. And the opioid agonist methadone works by being a very long-acting opioid and acting at the opioid receptor. And in high enough doses, it thwarts the use of other opioid agonists. Buprenorphine is different. First of all, it can be prescribed from a doctor's office, so the patient doesn't have to go to a methadone clinic every day. They can get it as part of routine medical care, just like they might get their insulin for their diabetes or their blood pressure medicine. And it's intended to be less stigmatizing to get it as part of routine medical care. The other thing is that it's a partial agonist at the opioid receptor, so it doesn't continue to activate it the way methadone does. So there's what we call a sealing effect, which

• 10:08Speaker 01

  makes it much safer so that there isn't as much respiratory depression and there isn't as much risk of opioid overdose and death.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  It's really hard to overdose on it. It's hard, even if a child takes a pill of their adult family's or friend and off a table, that they will die from it because it does eventually just reach that sealing effect.

• 10:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  So buprenorphine, which is itself an opioid, would seem to offer a safer and more flexible treatment for opioid addiction. But how effective is it? That's what Dinafria was really looking for in her study at Yale.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  And so what we found was that those patients that were in the buprenorphine group were two times more likely to be in formal treatment at 30 days in one month.

• 11:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was a huge improvement over the two other groups in the study.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  So about 37% of patients in the referral group were in treatment and about 45% in the brief intervention group and then almost 80% in the buprenorphine group.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  So they were able to double the rate of engagement of patients who showed up for a follow-up meeting.

• 11:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  When Jean Marie Perron of Penn saw the Yale study, she was impressed and excited.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  And that is so critical to, you know, getting people into treatment and that medication stabilizes the cycle of withdrawal that that patients are experiencing. So it's really important to not say you can come in tomorrow for your first appointment, but here's a medication. The next 12 hours won't be the hell you think it's going to be if you start on this medication now.

• 11:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that sounds like a wildly useful drug that I'm sure every hospital and medical board and state legislature must be in favor of dispensing more of this antidote, yes?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  That's, that's, that's probably a no. I think there's a lot of good people in theory who do want to do this and expand our treatment. I think the logistics of learning how to administer buprenorphine sounds more complicated than it might be and that is a barrier.

• 12:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you mean by the logistics of administering it?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  So first of all, in order to write a prescription for buprenorphine, you have to get something called an X waiver, which means that you have to take an eight-hour training program and you have to apply to the DEA to get a special waiver.

• 12:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does the same sort of waiver licensing process apply to prescribing medical opioids in the first place?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  It does not. So I can in fact treat your opioid use disorder with, you know, oxycodone or hydromorphone if I wanted to and that would be not regulated at all.

• 12:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  So why the extra level of regulation for buprenorphine?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  It's complicated, but when we went from the late 60s when we started methadone and, you know, we had people who needed treatment, but we weren't going to let just any doctor prescribe it. And so that's why methadone was restricted to these federal treatment programs. But then when we said, well, you know, in 2000, buprenorphine became available and was approved in the United States, but we weren't just going to let every doctor put out a shingle and start administering buprenorphine.

• 13:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Buprenorphine is most commonly administered in a name brand drug called Suboxone, which also contains naloxone. Buprenorphine was invented by the pharma firm Reket Benkaiser in 1966, one of many synthetic opioids designed in the 20th century. They were meant to treat pain, but be less addictive than opium itself. But as it turned out, most of them were addictive. That is the foundational problem of the prescription opioid crisis. In the 1990s, Reket Benkaiser recognized buprenorphine's potential for treating opioid use disorder, and it spun off its buprenorphine division into what is now a subsidiary company called Indivior. Several years ago, another drug company

• 14:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  thought about getting into the buprenorphine market: Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, one of the most widely abused prescription opioids. A Purdue memo at the time called buprenorphine "an attractive market", but they never did jump in. Today, Purdue is the target of thousands of lawsuits charged with having downplayed the addictive nature of OxyContin. Just how influential was Purdue in the opioid universe? Consider this startling development: The World Health Organization recently retracted its two main guidelines for using opioids to treat pain. Why? Because the guidelines, it has now been discovered, were unduly influenced by opioid manufacturers,

• 14:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  including Purdue's international subsidiary. And yet, at this moment, OxyContin is still legally and widely dispensed as "a useful painkiller that is also easily subject to abuse." Suboxone, meanwhile, is much harder to abuse, but is also harder to get. What do medical professionals who treat opioid addiction think of this? Here's what one doctor wrote on the Health Affairs blog. Buprenorphine has the potential to be a transformative tool in healthcare practitioners' fight to reduce deaths from opioid overdose, but that the ex-wavering process is onerous, outdated, and hampers our ability to help patients manage and recover from opioid addiction.

• 15:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  An editorial in JAMA Psychiatry made the same complaint and noted that easing the restrictions on buprenorphine in France helped drive down deaths from opioid overdose there by nearly 80%. If extrapolated to the United States, the authors wrote, this translates to more than 30,000 fewer annual deaths from opioid overdoses.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  So globally, the statistics are tremendous. No doubt in the evidence there.

• 16:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you see the waiver requirement for buprenorphine as a sort of overcorrection, over-response to the medical community's own embrace of opioids in the first place? Like, we messed up big time, and at the very least, what we're not going to do now is mess up in the same direction, even though this might be a different direction?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I think it lingers because of some of those concerns. But if we go back to 2000, we didn't really have any kind of opioid crisis in 2000. So it was really approved in the absence of a big surge in opioid use at the time. I think not repealing it at this point is probably multifactorial. People are worried about suboxone diversion, so the same substance that we want to prescribe is also available on the street, and we acknowledge that. But it's not used on the street to get high. It's used for patients to treat their own withdrawal symptoms when they're unable to get other medications. So I think that's part of why there's been some resistance to taking away the ex-waiver. I think it also is going to take an act of Congress, which is fairly hard to accomplish.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  And I think that repealing the ex-waiver isn't entirely going to, you know, open the floodgates for prescribers who want to prescribe buprenorphine. There's still some education and some stigma that needs to be addressed before more people are going to be willing to prescribe.

• 17:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  This situation has changed somewhat since we first published this episode. In 2023, President Biden did sign a bill eliminating the federal requirement for doctors to obtain an X waiver to prescribe buprenorphine, but some states still have their own restrictions on prescribing the medication. And that isn't the only thing that's keeping buprenorphine from being used more widely.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  If you look at residential treatment programs across the country, most of them, over 70% of them, are still abstinence 12-step based programs.

• 17:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Stephen Lloyd, a physician in Tennessee who specializes in addiction. Lloyd himself was addicted to prescription painkillers for years.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  Basically, I took pills all day long. When I got out of bed in the morning, I had withdrawn during the night, so I was sweating. Felt, you know, I felt like an 80-year-old man and I was in my early 30s.

• 18:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Lloyd went into a detox program and then a 30-day residential rehab facility, which got him turned around. Today, he's the medical director for a network of addiction treatment centers.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  I'm a big believer in medication-assisted treatment, and we know that the most effective thing that we can do for opioid addiction is actually medication-assisted treatment with the use of drugs like buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone. And I've taken heat from this in the local treatment community, as well as the treatment community statewide and even nationally.

• 18:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you just describe where that pushback and that reluctance is coming from?

• 18:52Speaker 04

  Well, unfortunately, Stephen, the pushback comes from people in the recovery community. And one of the problems with addiction medicine is that most of the people that work in the field, or a lot of the people that work in the field, had the issue themselves. That's how they got in the field, like myself. But they believe that the only way to get healthy is how they got healthy. So it's totally anecdotal.

• 19:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  As Lloyd noted, most addiction treatment programs do stress total abstinence, including 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. How successful are such programs? That is a famously difficult question. Solid data are hard to come by. After all, anonymity is a feature of such programs, and there are all kinds of possible selection biases. Alcoholics Anonymous claims that 75% of its participants stay sober. But academic studies put the success rate closer to 10% or even less. That said, one Stanford study compared addicts who quit with the help of AA versus those who quit on their own, and found that AA nearly doubled the success rate.

• 20:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Stephen Lloyd's argument is that abstinence is the chosen path for the recovery community, but that medical professionals embrace MAT, medication-assisted treatment.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  You've got the World Health Organization, you've got NIDA.

• 20:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  Everybody who looks at this says the role of medication is paramount. It should be the cornerstone. Yet, it's so hard to get people into those programs because of the stigma associated with it. A lot of times, it'll be from parents. I've had numerous parents talk their kids out of medication because they said they were trading one drug for another, and then, a few months down the road, I get the call that they've overdosed and died. And I can't tell you how heartbreaking those calls are.

• 20:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  If I say to you, "I don't like the idea of the pharmaceutical industry being able to be the chief beneficiary of medication-assisted treatment because they helped drive this problem in the first place." It's a little bit like, you know, I set a house on fire, then I'm the hero who calls in the fire to the fire department. I don't like the optics of that. I don't like the economics of that. What do you say to that argument?

• 21:06Speaker 04

  I'd say I agree with you 1,000%. It makes me choke every time I think about it. But I don't have a better option. I don't have anything else that's going to stop my patients dying at the rate that MAT does. I can't stand it. I read somewhere recently that several years back, Purdue Pharma tried to acquire the marketing rights to buprenorphine, which just absolutely is unconscionable to me. And so, I would agree with you 1,000%. I wish there was a better option. But right now, there's not. And so, I can't let my feelings get in the way of trying to help my patients and help them stay alive.

• 21:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Could you describe for me the underlying causes of opioid addiction? I guess what I'm looking for is if you could break it down between a physiological addiction or craving, as well as the psychological and environmental drivers?

• 21:58Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know how much more I need to break it down. You just did. You know, that's the classic bio cycle social model that you just described. So that's really the three big components of developing any addiction, in this case opioids. So you've got the, I teach it in terms of a slot machine, you know, when the three sevens come down on the pay line, that's when the money comes out. So the first seven is the bio component, and that's simply genetics. Do you have a family history of any addiction? If you do, then that first seven comes down on the pay line. And addiction is about 60% genetic, for the most part. The second part is the psychological component. What kind of household are you raised in? Do you have a high ACEs score, adverse childhood experiences? Were you physically, sexually, or emotionally abused? Do you have that chronic trauma, maybe even later in your life?

• 22:43Speaker 04

  If you do, then that second seven is down on the pay line. And then the third seven is the social component, and that's just the availability. You know, what is widely available? And the thing that's most widely available and accepted is alcohol. And that's still mostly what we see people abusing and addicted to. But in the late 1980s, early 90s, and into the 2000s, opioids became much more widespread.

• 23:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  You and many others call addiction generally a disease. And it sounds like the factors that may determine your likelihood for the disease are pretty much everywhere. So do you see this as a different sort of disease than we typically think about with epidemiology?

• 23:26Speaker 04

  Let's take a disease that everybody agrees on, type 2 diabetes mellitus. You know, nobody has a problem with type 2 diabetes being a disease, right? I never hear any discussion about that. Yet, for the most part, it's behavioral, right? Why do people get type 2 diabetes? Well, they don't eat right, and they don't exercise correctly. And so we treat that widely with medication to try to decrease the bad outcomes with diabetes. So, you know, I look at addiction as being much the same.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  If you know about addiction, addiction is a brain disease.

• 23:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gail Donofeu again, from Yale.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  And we know by looking at scans of the brain that even though I maybe have had treatment and I'm no longer physically dependent, the minute you show me something, whether it's a syringe, or it could be just a place that I used, parts of my brain, my amygdala, will light up, showing that I still have this craving, I still have this possibility to use if I get back in that situation. I can't pray myself out of it, I can't will myself out of it.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  So it doesn't matter if I call it a disease or a learning disorder, it is a rewiring of the brain, the reward system in the frontal lobe interaction, and to where the primary focus becomes acquisition of this substance for me to be okay. And so when I look at it in those terms, it looks a lot like diabetes to me.

• 24:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you talk for a minute about federal policy toward medication-assisted treatment, and perhaps buprenorphine specifically? From what I've read, the policy recommendations during the Trump administration have been evolving very rapidly.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  If you look at, you know, President Trump's first appointment to the head of Department of Health and Human Services was Dr. Tom Price. He came out early on and said, "Well, you know, this is simply switching one drug for another." And those of us in the addiction field had serious angst about that. But you have folks in HHS right now that are giving really good direction with regards to medication-assisted treatment and making it more widely available. It is evolving quickly, and I think we're to the point now that some of the stigma is being decreased simply because so many people have died. Instead of defining recovery as total abstinence from any medication, I want to define recovery in those parameters of, is your life getting better? Are you still going to jail? Do you have your kids

• 25:41Speaker 04

  back? Do you have a job? Are you a member of the taxpaying citizenship of the United States? To me, those are much more reflective of effective treatment than whether or not somebody's totally abstinent from all drugs because some 12-step group says they have to be.

• 25:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Stephen Lloyd's philosophy, as well as that of Gail D'Onofrio and Jean-Marie Perron, falls under the umbrella of what is called harm reduction. It's the idea that you treat risk not as something that must be driven to zero. In a recent episode called "The Truth About the Vaping Crisis," we talked about the battle between smoking abstentionists, people who argue that nobody should be consuming any nicotine in any form, and harm reductionists, who argue that vaping may carry risks, but they're almost certainly smaller than the risks from smoking cigarettes. When it comes to opioid abuse, the gap between the abstentionists and the harm reductionists seems to be even wider. Why is that? What's different about opioids?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  It's always been stigmatized. I don't know why.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  So I think anytime you lessen the stigma associated with addiction, you increase people's opportunity to step out of the shadows and ask for help.

• 26:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  After the break, how that help happens, when it happens, and we talked to two addicts in recovery, one of whom now works at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, helping other addicts break the grip. You're listening to Freakonomics Radio. I'm Stephen Dubner. We'll be right back.

• 27:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  As we've been hearing, treating opioid addiction with another opioid, like buprenorphine, is not a concept that is universally embraced. But a lot of smart and dedicated people are in favor, including Jean-Marie Perron, a medical researcher and ER doctor at the University of Pennsylvania. She and her team have been creating a new treatment protocol for opioid addiction that includes buprenorphine, or Suboxone.

• 27:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  But more than just that, they are changing the way addicts are treated from the moment they wind up in the ER. This treatment includes what they call a warm handoff.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  So a warm handoff is a newish term, is the idea that a patient at a hospital or a clinic is going to be discharged, having already met a peer or someone who's going to either accompany them to an appointment, or they've met the doctor or clinician who will take care of them, so that there's a close connection between the patient and the patient's next step in recovery.

• 28:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And there's another member of the warm handoff team, a peer counselor.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Our peer counselors are people who are in recovery themselves and who can start the dialogue right there about, you know, what it would look like if they tried medication or tried to get into a treatment program or tried to engage in care right then. It's all about engagement.

• 28:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  These peer counselors are on staff at the hospital. They've gone through certification training and they've got firsthand experience as opioid addicts.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  I think they're some of the most, not just dedicated, but, you know, people who have been through more than I've ever been in my super easy life and who have come to the other side and who want to help other people and who are successful at helping other people. They're special.

• 29:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  People like Nicole.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  People like Nicole, absolutely.

• 29:09Speaker 05

  I am Nicole O'Donnell and I'm a certified recovery specialist in emergency rooms at Penn.

• 29:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Nicole, what's your story? How'd you get to be in this position?

• 29:19Speaker 05

  So from using to here, it was a lot of work. So my first love was Benzos, which was Xanax. That's what I became addicted to. I went to rehab, I was 21, my first time I went to treatment, inpatient treatment, and it worked. It worked for about two years. And then there was opioid painkillers around, so that's, you know, why not, right? And then OxyContin's weren't really as readily available then, so it was like perk 30s and opiates that were, you know, someone's prescription that we got.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  And then they are very expensive, so it was easier to get heroin.

• 30:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then what happened? How'd you finally get clean?

• 30:10Speaker 05

  I was tired of stalling withdrawal because that's all I was doing in the end was using so I wasn't in withdrawal, right? So I came to this realization that I'm going to continue to be in withdrawal every single time until I do something about it because the withdrawal is awful and nobody wants to be in it. And I realized my life was trying to figure out how I was getting drugs just to stop withdrawal. It's not fun in the end. It's not a party. Nobody's happy, you know? You're just really trying not to be sick and barely functioning.

• 30:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  You had a sister, yes?

• 30:43Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 30:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  At least one?

• 30:45Speaker 05

  Yes, three years younger than me, Jessica.

• 30:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. And I understand she died of an overdose?

• 30:49Speaker 05

  She did and it was December 14th of 14.

• 30:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. And what were her drugs or drugs?

• 30:56Speaker 05

  Heroin.

• 30:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what was your relationship like with her then?

• 30:59Speaker 05

  We used together.

• 31:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 05

  She gave me heroin for the first time. So I was doing restaurant management for the first seven years of my recovery and then I lost my sister. And that's when I started doing outreach. I needed to give her death purpose and I needed to maybe be the person for people that she probably didn't encounter in her act of addiction.

• 31:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  O'Donnell introduced me to one of the people that she's been helping.

• 31:27Speaker 06

  My name's Eileen Richardson. I am a restaurant manager. I'm also an alcoholic and an addict. I'm from the Jersey Shore originally, new to Philadelphia. I've been here a little over a year now. I'm married. I have a wife. I have a son. He just turned three.

• 31:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Congratulations. What's his name?

• 31:47Speaker 06

  His name is Henrik or Henrik Matthew Richardson, as he likes to say.

• 31:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  On the day we spoke, Richardson had been in recovery for 93 days. She had come into the Penn ER after overdosing.

• 31:57Speaker 06

  And Nicole came to meet me in the hospital. I believe it was the physician that I saw asked me if I was interested in getting help and he said he had somebody he knew that I could talk to and Nicole showed up to talk to me.

• 32:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. You overdosed on what?

• 32:14Speaker 06

  On heroin and fentanyl.

• 32:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nicole helped Eileen get on Suboxone.

• 32:20Speaker 06

  I'm still doing the Suboxone. You know, I take it every day. The Suboxone helps. I don't have cravings and right away that started. When I went back in the second time to the Suboxone clinic, the recent time, they upped my dose. And from that day on, I haven't had a single craving for any opiate since.

• 32:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's that feel like?

• 32:40Speaker 06

  Pretty awesome. Pretty amazing.

• 32:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how much of your success would you attribute to working with Nicole? And having a peer who understands it, the drug itself, and then any other third or fourth reason?

• 32:55Speaker 06

  I mean, they all play a big part. I wouldn't want to break it into percentages or graphs or anything like that because for me, it's all intertwined.

• 33:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  But do you think that Nicole, without the Suboxone, would do it?

• 33:07Speaker 06

  No, the Suboxone is definitely something I needed. But if I was just doing the Suboxone and nothing else, I would stop taking the Suboxone. It wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't keep taking it. The, you know, the drug helps the physical part. And then everything else I do helps me become a new person, a new human being, which is my goal.

• 33:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  So the Suboxone helps you get back to the level that Nicole can work.

• 33:33Speaker 06

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. In my belief, yeah.

• 33:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Nicole, Suboxone sounds like a really good solution, at least for some of the people, some of the time, right? Can you talk about, I guess, the problem or the barrier of being able to use it as widely as it might ought to be used?

• 33:50Speaker 06

  So from my perspective, aside from, you know, the X-wavering and the medical barriers that the doctors experience, from our experience too, is there's a big stigma with it in the recovery community. The recovery community traditionally has been abstinence based, and that means nothing. No medications, no illicit drug use, nothing.

• 34:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  How come?

• 34:15Speaker 06

  It's just this, you know, it's this deep seated thing, you know, the 12 step programs, there's a lot of tradition and stuff like that. And there's not a lot of change. And I'm not, not gonna lie, like, I love the 12 steps and I love the program and it's done so much for me, but I don't talk about the fact that I used to box in. My sponsor knows, you know, my close friends know, but I don't bring it up in meetings. And there's different 12 step programs, obviously, and one of them specifically states that MAT is not considered clean.

• 34:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Eileen, right before we started recording, you told us that a friend of yours just died.

• 34:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just now.

• 34:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't know how much you wanna say about those circumstances. It's a friend you knew for how long and how'd they die?

• 35:02Speaker 06

  I have known him since I started going to the 12 step group that I, that I go to, what we call our home group back in February. He was coming up on a year sober. In 18 days, he would have had a year. And he, you know, this is, this is how it happens is that people stop and then they, they go back out and they think they can use the same amount that they were using once before and you just can't anymore. You're pretty much killing yourself if you go back out. Not people always close to me, but I know someone that's dying every week. But, I mean, this one, you know, I was with him yesterday and we were talking and joking

• 35:44Speaker 06

  about the fishing trip that we're going on next week and, you know, his mom was just talking to him on Facebook about how proud she was of him. And it's just, it's a horrible disease, you know?

• 35:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  It was heroin?

• 35:58Speaker 06

  Probably heroin and fentanyl. Everything's fentanyl now.

• 36:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  The opioid crisis really began with prescription pills, then moved into heroin and now synthetic fentanyl, which presents a particularly high risk of overdose. To that end, there is another idea currently under consideration in Philadelphia.

• 36:20Speaker 05

  We're all harm reductionists here.

• 36:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nicole O'Donnell again, the certified recovery specialist.

• 36:26Speaker 05

  So we advocate for, you know, safe injection practices, the needle exchange, but there's this safe house that we're all advocating for. And it's a place to go for people to safely not overdose. They go, use. Drugs get tested, they have medical staff, they have peers, hopefully, there to navigate them into treatment the same way we do in the emergency room.

• 36:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  The legal, official, kind of, safe drug use site that O'Donnell is describing doesn't exist yet, at least not in Philadelphia. Two sites have been approved in the US, one in New York City, which is up and running, and one in Providence, Rhode Island, which is still in development. Sites like this also exist in several Canadian cities. The Safe House nonprofit is backed by many local and state officials, but it has faced pushback from the US Justice Department. Things today don't look promising. A federal court recently ruled against Safe House in a multi-year case against the Justice Department.

• 37:30Speaker 05

  My point of advocacy for Safe House is for people like your friends that just passed, because he's in recovery, right? If I used, I'm gonna die. Fortunately, through my years of, you know, this advocacy, I have a person, I have a Safe House, I have a person that I would call if I didn't want to die, to make sure I didn't overdose if I used. I have that, that's a safety net, right? Not everyone has that, so this is a place that we want people to be able to go, like your friends. If he was at this place, he wouldn't have died.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  The opposite of addiction is not recovery. The opposite of addiction is community and relationship. You can't have community if you're dead.

• 38:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dr. Stephen Lloyd again.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  So the first thing is to keep patients alive. Now, the longer that we keep them alive, the more that we need to be able to engage them in supportive environments around really everything.

• 38:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what's your position on, I guess, legal dispensaries of illegal drugs? And I'm curious if there's any movement toward that in Tennessee.

• 38:31Speaker 04

  You're really putting me in a position to get in trouble. I think we have to look at this point at all harm reduction strategies. So I think anytime you lessen the stigma associated with addiction, you increase people's opportunity to step out of the shadows and ask for help, and I'm for any modality that gets people to that point.

• 38:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Warm Handoff Program at UPenn is still relatively new. I asked Nicole O'Donnell, the recovery specialist, how many patients she will see in a given day.

• 39:01Speaker 05

  In an average day, we could see up to six people. I mean, whether they're inpatient for a medical reason, inpatient in our inpatient drug and alcohol treatment, or they're through the emergency room.

• 39:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  And of those six, how many are willing to at least have a conversation with you about medication-assisted therapy?

• 39:19Speaker 05

  Honestly, there's not many that say they don't want to talk. Whether they want things or not's a different story, you know? Then we have a harm reduction conversation. But nobody really throws you out of the room and says, "I don't want to talk about anything."

• 39:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if there's one misperception about opioids, about use, abuse, whatever, that many people, like public radio nerds who are going to listen to this, if there's one thing they really don't know, what would you want to tell people?

• 39:58Speaker 05

  That opiate use disorder is treatable. It's not a death sentence. It's not, you know, it's a medical condition and it's treatable.

• 40:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  It sounds so simple when you say it that way, but there's all this conversation going on around the topic now in the political community, and it's never said that simply. Why not?

• 40:18Speaker 05

  Because we like to overcomplicate things, and it really doesn't need to be overcomplicated. Eileen takes her medication, she engages, and she goes to meetings, and she's doing amazing, and she's a mom to her son, right? It's treatable. We don't have to overcomplicate it.

• 40:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was our report on the opioid crisis from 2020. We recently reached out to the team at Penn for an update. Here's what Dr. Perone told us. "Our program has grown substantially since we last spoke. We started a new center at Penn called the Center for Addiction Medicine and Policy and have multiple grants to sustain our work." Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski. Our staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouajie, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel

• 41:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Julie Kanfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thank you for listening.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.

• 41:54Speaker 05

  Stitcher.