Helping with Addiction

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Anchor lead: Technology has been able to help some under treatment for drug addiction during the pandemic, Elizabeth Tracey reports

If you’re being treated for drug addiction, coming to a center to get your medicine has many challenges, especially as the Covid-19 epidemic continues. Eric Strain, a drug abuse expert at Johns Hopkins, says technology has been developed that can help.

Strain: We’re moving to these automated systems where medicine can be loaded into a box which automatically opens each day to make the medicine available to the patient without giving them thirty days worth or twenty days worth at a time. It’s kind of a cool thing. The physician who’s making the medicine available to the patient is able to program the box from home, remotely, while the patient gets the box which then has the doses in it.  :30

Strain says the box is helpful to many but cannot be used by others, so other strategies to facilitate treatment for drug addiction are being developed. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.