Rep. Elijah Cummings urged Baltimore hospitals Thursday to take advantage of the city?s offer to pay for drug therapy training.
Cummings? recommendation signals a possible expansion in use of the restricted drug buprenorphine, which many doctors say is a more effective alternative to methadone.
The recommendation comes on the heels of Baltimore Mayor Martin O?Malley?s speech on the future of health care in Maryland before the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Thursday in which he discussed the drug.
He stressed the importance of reducing drug addiction through programs like the buprenorphine therapy training.
“We were able to persuade our state to double funding for drug treatment. What we found was not only did we save money, but we saved lives,” O?Malley said to a packed house at the school.
The city also has offered to sponsor free online training in the use of the federally restricted drug to any doctor willing to prescribe it.
O?Malley said his goal is to double the number of trained physicians to 200 in the city, allowing them to treat another 3,000 patients with the restricted drug.
Heroin addiction had become “so pervasive, underneath so many other things for which we spent money, sometimes we forgot it was there,” he said. Injuries, HIV infections, accidents and many other related diseases can be traced back to heroin addiction.
The Drug Enforcement Administration called Baltimore the “most addicted city” in America from 1994 to 1999, when Charm City also became known as the most violent city in America.
During that time, the population began fleeing for safer suburbs, O?Malley said. “Go figure. Who wants to stay in a place that?s full of drug dealers and violence?”
Drug addictions counselor Michael Gimbel, of Sheppard Pratt Health System, remained skeptical that the city initiative would have as strong an impact as city officials hoped. Buprenorphine “is expensive and insurance companies are not always paying for it, and many doctors do not want to work with the inner city addict population in their private practices.”
Other incentives should be offered to these physicians, he said, if the initiative is to succeed.
O?Malley said his initiatives to measure results of city workers ? from those who fill potholes to those who test for HIV/AIDS, as well as needle exchanges and homeless ? treatment programs, with cutting the rate of new HIV patients by 25 percent.
