Advocates from the National Coalition to Liberate Methadone discussed the stigma associated with methadone treatment and recommended ways to expand it during a virtual event hosted by the Opioid Task Force of Franklin County and the North Quabbin Region on Thursday afternoon.

The discussion kicked off with an overview of methadone treatment to curb opioid addiction, as well as methadone’s history of regulation and restriction. Caty Simon, a member of the National Coalition to Liberate Methadone and the National Survivors Union, explained that although there has been a “small dent” in the opioid crisis in recent years, overdose deaths are still rising in some parts of the country, particularly in minority communities.

Simon noted that although methadone restrictions eased slightly during the pandemic, many municipalities throughout the country neglected to take advantage of this.

“Pre-COVID, less than 20% of people diagnosable with opioid use disorder were accessing methadone — the purported gold standard with a decades-long evidence base behind it — because of rigid federal regulations dating back to the Nixon era,” Simon said. “These regulations were temporarily relaxed early on during COVID, but many states’ opioid treatment programs did not take advantage of these relaxations.”

The National Coalition to Liberate Methadone, a roughly 100-person organization founded in 2022, is comprised of a diverse array of individuals from across the United States, including people who once struggled with addiction, health care physicians and researchers.

The organization, Simon explained, works to draft and advocate for policies that facilitate access to methadone treatment on a national level. In addition to conducting a pandemic-era survey that reached drug users and methadone patients nationwide, the organization focused on creating opioid addiction treatment practices that were informed by those directly impacted by the epidemic.

A large part of the coalition’s work, according to member Dr. Noa Krawczyk, of the Grossman School of Medicine at New York University, was advocacy for the Modernizing Opioid Treatment Access Act. If passed, this bill would allow pharmacies to provide people suffering from opioid addiction with prescribed methadone to take home. Currently, methadone patients can only access the treatment through on-site use at a clinic.

Krawczyk said bills like the Modernizing Opioid Treatment Access Act, introduced by U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, in March 2023, aim to destigmatize methadone treatment and instead, treat it similarly to any other medical treatment.

“The overarching goal of our organization … and a leading North Star in terms of everything that goes into methadone treatment, is the practice of normalizing methadone treatment as health care,” Krawczyk explained. “It’s really this overarching idea of moving methadone into health care and out of the criminalization and stigmatization so that the system is built in grounding methadone treatment in person-centeredness.”

Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at acammalleri@recorder.com or 413-930-4429.