DOUGH RAY METH –
July 16, 2025 – Unlike with opioids, there is no medication to suppress cravings for meth and other stimulants. As use soars, hundreds of clinics are trying a radically different approach. Jamie Mains heard about a program that would reward her for abstaining. “For me,” she said, “money was a good enough reason to try.” Jamie Mains showed up for her checkup so high that there was no point in pretending otherwise. At least she wasn’t shooting fentanyl again; medication was suppressing those cravings. Now it was methamphetamine that manacled her, keeping her from eating, sleeping, thinking straight. Still, she could not stop injecting.
“Give me something that’s going to help me with this,” she begged her doctor.
“There is nothing,” the doctor replied.
Overcoming meth addiction has become one of the biggest challenges of the national drug crisis. Fentanyl deaths have been dropping, in part because of medications that can reverse overdoses and curb the urge to use opioids. But no such prescriptions exist for meth, which works differently on the brain.
In recent years, meth, a highly addictive stimulant, has been spreading aggressively across the country, rattling communities and increasingly involved in overdoses. Lacking a medical treatment, a growing number of clinics are trying a startlingly different strategy: To induce patients to stop using meth, they pay them.
