Newsom signs bill expanding methadone access in California amid opioid crisis
In the ongoing fight against opioid addiction, Gov. Gavin Newson has signed a bill aimed at expanding access to methadone treatment in California.
Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2115 by Assemblymember Matt Haney, a Democrat from San Francisco. The measure, which was unanimously approved in the legislature, aims to end what Haney said were outdated state laws limiting access to the medication.
"We've reached a point where the treatment for opioid addiction is much harder to get than the deadly drugs themselves," Haney said in a statement Friday.
According to Haney's office, the bill changes California's laws on methadone to align with federal guidelines set by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Among the changes, doctors would be allowed to prescribe patients up to 72 hours' worth of methadone that they can take home. The amount of methadone a patient could take home would also be increased, allowing them to avoid lining up for treatment on a daily basis.
Previously, state regulations only allow methadone clinics to prescribe methadone along with requiring patients to line up at clinics each morning. Haney said drug dealers often prey on people with addiction as they wait in line.
"Dealers are much better at getting fentanyl and heroin into people's hands than we are at getting them addiction medication. We have to reverse that entirely if we want to save people's lives," he said.
Other changes include allowing for expedited entry into a treatment program and removing the requirement that patients have at least one year of recorded opioid use before receiving treatment.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioid overdose deaths have dropped to their lowest numbers in three years, but remain at higher levels than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CDC estimates there were 75,091 opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. for the year ending in April, according to provisional figures from the agency. Pre-pandemic, there were fewer than 50,000 fatal overdoses a year.
In San Francisco, which has been hit hard by the opioid crisis, overdose deaths reached a record last year to over 800. The deaths were mostly attributed to fentanyl.
AB 2115, which has an urgency statute, goes into effect immediately.