This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 7th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

Methodone clinics are often viewed as a step toward allowing people addicted to or dependent on opioids a path forward to get

their lives together. But the way the methadone is typically administered and the strings

attached for beneficiaries of methadone treatment is unconscionable.

So says Helen Redmond, filmmaker, and senior editor at Filter.

We spoke in September.

Just as for the elucidation of listeners, how effective is methadone at helping people give up more powerful drugs that could be more disruptive to their lives?

Well, it's considered to be the gold standard of medication to treat opioid use disorder.

It's been studied for 40 plus years. It's safe. It works. It is harm reduction. It cuts the death rate for people who can get on the medication. It cuts the rate of

overdose death by 50%. That is truly amazing. So this is a

a medication that has potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives

of lives. The problem is the methadone clinic system. That is a system of harm

production and that is why we need to close down methadone clinics and move to a pharmacy dispensing system.

And for people who are taking methadone, we can predict fairly accurately that these are people who do not want to be either

addicted to or dependent on more powerful opioids.

I don't know. I guess that's up to each individual to

answer. What I do know is that when people are prescribed methadone, they want to take it because it saves their lives, it

allows them to get back on track, to not be in the crosshairs of the drug war, which is being carried out in part

by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is unfortunately a regulator of the methadone clinic system along with

SAMHSA the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

So people want to take methadone, many want to stay on it, but it is the clinic

...