TUCSON, Ariz. — September is National Recovery Month— a month dedicated to celebrating substance use recovery. That's a feat that some treatment facilities are seeing as more difficult as the potency of drugs on the street grows.
Drug treatment facilities in Tucson are adapting their approach as stronger illegal drugs flood the streets
Community Medical Services in Tucson has found itself relying more heavily on methadone in recent years as synthetic opioids like fentanyl become more prevalent. For the past two decades, treatment facilities have used medications like Suboxone, Buprenorphine and Methadone to treat opioid addiction, choosing the drug based on the patient's stage of withdrawal.
"Methadone is what we call a full opioid agonist, so it replaces the opioid—the illicit opioid— in somebody's opioid receptor," said Desiree Auge, Community Impact Manager at Community Medical Services.
The popularity of synthetic opioids has led the facility to not only prescribe methadone over Suboxone more frequently, but also to increase those doses.
"It's been a little bit more difficult to try to get people on track. Some clients are reporting— at intake— using 60, 80, 100 pills a day," Auge said.
Over 1,200 deaths have been reported in Arizona, according to the Arizona Department of Health.
"People are not really using even to get high anymore, they're just using not to be sick," Auge said.
The medications help ease withdrawal symptoms, encouraging people into treatment without the pain of detox.
"That's all you remember is the pain that your body was going through during that time. So when you have people consistently doing that, when you mention treatment to them, their automatic thought may go to detox, and they're going to say no," Auge said.
At Community Medical Services, the goal is stability, not sobriety, achieved with the help of medication-assisted treatment. Auge says her team is changing the narrative of what treatment means, and they've seen steady growth in clients over the past few years. The facility now serves 2,228 people in Pima County.
Earlier this year, the treatment facility opened their third clinic in Tucson at Grant and Alvernon.
Auge stressed that methadone or Suboxone is just one piece of the recovery work they do at Community Medical Services. Treatment is paired with therapy and peer mentors.
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