Police‐led low‐threshold buprenorphine initiative associated with reduced ODs

Abstract

Brandon del Pozo, Ph.D., formerly chief of police in Burlington, Vermont, has focused on treating opioid use disorder in a nonpunitive way, and in “CommunityStat: A Public Health Intervention to Reduce Opioid Overdose Deaths in Burlington, Vermont, 2017–2020,” del Pozo, now a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, shows that even a “small city without a public health staff” can reduce overdoses with such a program. He noted that counterproductive policy performance metrics can be easily overemphasized, and instead in Burlington the interventions were novel, including: low‐threshold buprenorphine prescribing at the city's syringe services program, induction into buprenorphine‐based treatment at the local hospital emergency department, elimination of the regional waiting list for medications for opioid use disorder and the decriminalization of diverted buprenorphine by the chief of police and county prosecutor. These interventions led to a 50% reduction in Chittenden County's overdose deaths by the end of 2018 (compared with a 20% increase in the rest of Vermont), an effort that was sustained through 2019. Local legislators also led an effort that resulted in a state law requiring all inmates to be provided with medications to treat opioid use disorders, according to the article, which the author hopes will serve as an example for other municipalities to use. The article was published in the March issue of Contemporary Drug Problems.