About to enter a federal prison, a Massachusetts woman is not permitted to continue taking the opioid as a treatment to block cravings and withdrawal from heroin addiction.
By Abby Goodnough | The New York Times
A Massachusetts woman recovering from heroin addiction sued the Federal Bureau of Prisons on Friday over its policy prohibiting methadone treatment, which she wants to continue when she starts a yearlong sentence next month.
Her suit comes four months after a federal judge ordered a county jail outside Boston to let an incoming inmate stay on methadone instead of requiring him to go through forced withdrawal, as was its policy. It adds to growing pressure on the criminal justice system to provide methadone or other evidence-based treatments to the staggering number of inmates with opioid addiction.
The plaintiff, Stephanie DiPierro of Everett, Mass., was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison after pleading guilty last fall to theft of public funds; she had collected disability benefits and food stamps without reporting income from a job. Ms. DiPierro, now 38, became addicted to opioids as a teenager after her mother died of cancer.
Since 2005, she has gone to a clinic for daily doses of methadone, a kind of opioid that was approved decades ago to control cravings and withdrawal symptoms in people addicted to narcotic painkillers and heroin.
