By Emilie Eaton
Crystal Gonzales endured what she calls “a rough childhood” in San Antonio. Her father was in and out of prison for selling drugs. Her stepfather beat her mother, and his friends sexually abused Crystal. “I had trauma,” she says.
So when an older friend asked if she wanted to try marijuana, she said yes. She was 11. Later, she graduated to alcohol and cocaine. At 15 or 16, she started snorting heroin. In her 20s, she began injecting it.
She was around 30 when she decided to get sober and enrolled in a methadone treatment program in San Antonio.
“It saved my life,” said Gonzales, now 39. “It saved me.”
She’s one of the lucky ones. Even as fatal drug overdoses rise to alarming levels in Bexar County, medications such as methadone — considered the gold standard in opioid addiction treatment — are expensive and hard to find.
Texas has 31 million people and just 97 licensed opioid treatment clinics, according to the federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Bexar County, with a population of 2.1 million, has nine licensed treatment clinics, and many of them are often oversubscribed.
Relative to population, Texans receive medication-assisted treatment at opioid treatment facilities at the 6th lowest rate in the country: 50 per 100,000 people. That’s according to a 2022 survey by SAMHSA. By comparison, the U.S. rate is 139 patients per 100,000.
“These treatments are not very accessible, and they’re not very cheap,” said Dr. Christopher Healey, a psychiatrist who oversees two opioid treatment programs at the Center for Health Care Services, a Bexar County-funded provider of services to people with mental health, addiction or developmental challenges.
“Patients can’t find a clinic to enroll in, and if they’re able to find a clinic to enroll in, then another gap is the pure cost of the medication,” Healey said.
At some clinics, methadone costs as much as $500 a month, putting it out of reach for those with low-paying jobs or without health insurance.
It’s one of several ways Texas is behind the curve in addressing the addiction crisis, a San Antonio Express-News investigation found. Addiction treatment options for methamphetamine and other stimulants also are hard to come by, and it’s illegal to possess practical supplies such as fentanyl test strips, which can be life-saving.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin. It can be prescribed for severe pain but increasingly is being manufactured illegally and mixed into the supply of street drugs. It’s so potent even a minuscule dose can kill you.
Public health experts say adequate funding for treatment is an uphill battle in Texas.
“There’s a lot of need,” said Cynthia Humphrey, executive director of the Association of Substance Abuse Programs. “And lawmakers want to see the cost savings on the other side of that yearly budget. They want to see, ‘If I put this money in, I’m going to save dollars here.’ But we need to be investing in long-term outcomes.”
Read more at ExpressNews.com.