Prisoner addiction on the agenda.
For years New Mexico has either led or been a needle's length away from the top of national rankings in drug overdoses, overdose deaths and drug-related crime per capita.
***image4***The state's incarcerated population-and its female inmates in particular-are predictably susceptible. According to New Mexico Department of Corrections statistics, nearly 40 percent of all female inmates in New Mexico were arrested for drug-related offenses. The recidivism rate for drug offenders hovers upwards of 70 percent at the women's correctional facility in Grants alone.
Now two prominent Albuquerque women are making strides to jolt state government into readdressing the drug problem in its prison system.
One is Dr. Barbara McGuire, an internal medicine physician who surveyed the issue first-hand while serving as the regional medical director of the New Mexico DOC from January 2003 until July 2004.
"Drug-related crimes are one of the main reasons people in New Mexico are landing in prison," McGuire says. "It's also one of the main reasons people keep coming back five, six and seven times."
The other person is state Rep. Mimi Stewart, D-Bernalillo, who will introduce a bill for the upcoming legislative session to establish an opiate-replacement therapy pilot project at the Grants facility (Stewart introduced a comparable bill last year). If the bill passes, the two-year project-a joint operation between the DOC and the DOH-will monitor the progress of 30 female inmates who are at least one month away from parole for at least a year after release.
The project will center on treatment using buprenorphine-one of the two chemical forms that McGuire says are typically manifested in ***image3***opiate-replacement therapy. The other is methadone.
Buprenorphine would be McGuire's first choice. The physician says she is currently treating 10 patients in her private practice with Suboxone-one of the brand names for buprenorphine-with positive results. McGuire says the benefits of Suboxone-as opposed to methadone-is that the drug, typically given in pill form, is safer, less addictive, less sedating, less regulated, easier to handle and easier to administer.
But while buprenorphine is approved by the FDA and endorsed by the American Medical Association as an effective option for opiate-replacement therapy, McGuire says the mere idea of accommodating inmate addiction is a tough pill for many people to swallow.
"There is a punitive element to it," McGuire says. "The public wants to feel that people are being punished for their crimes. But this isn't saying that people in prison don't deserve to be punished. It's saying that we need to stop the revolving door and take a medical approach to a medical problem."
McGuire says it's the DOC that has been the most resistant toward efforts to introduce opiate-replacement treatment into the prison system.
***image5***"In my opinion, the corrections department doesn't want to admit that it has addicts in the system," McGuire says. "If you institute a treatment program in prison that's admitting that there are addicts in prison. [Prison officials] are confiscating drugs and needles all the time, but they don't want the public to know that…I don't want to villainize the corrections department-it's a difficult job-but I don't think any system can prevent a person with the desire to get drugs 100 percent of the time. That's why we need to make the public aware that this is a problem that isn't going to just go away."
Stewart says it's imperative that the corrections department be actively involved if the Grants pilot project is successfully launched. Whether it wants to or not.
"I think that sometimes departments in state government are not proactive or forward-thinking, they just kind of tread water," Stewart says. "But if we want to reduce the number of people in prison, we have to do something differently. We have to change our idea of the role of prison as just punishment and move towards more rehabilitation. I think this is a great way to do that."
