House calls on the Homeless –
December 28, 2019 – Though the city has worked to expand the availability of medications like buprenorphine, convincing people to enter treatment can be difficult. For people in active addiction, avoiding the pain of withdrawal is paramount, and can make long waits for a prescription or a spot in a treatment program impossible. Project RIDE is part of a two-year study looking at how to get addicted patients into treatment as quickly as possible. The van parks at Broad Street and Passyunk Avenue on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and provides free treatment for 30 days, or until patients enter a longer-term treatment program. The staff has helped connect others who don’t want buprenorphine, or can’t take it, to other services or treatment programs, and offers testing for HIV and hepatitis C — both common perils for injection drug users. That’s a key accommodation in communities like South Philly, where opioid use tends to be hidden behind closed doors, and stigma against addiction runs deep. A few miles northeast in Kensington, where open-air drug use and sales are pervasive, the public health organization Prevention Point runs its own mobile buprenorphine program in addition to services at its brick-and-mortar headquarters.
