Brown awarded $10.8M grant to develop opioid treatment program in criminal justice system

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BROWN UNIVERSITY is being awarded a $10.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to help develop and implement an opioid-addiction treatment program for people in the criminal justice system. / COURTESY BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE – The National Institutes of Health is awarding a $10.8 million grant to Brown University to develop and evaluate an opioid treatment program for those vulnerable to addiction in criminal justice systems in Rhode Island, North Carolina and Philadelphia.

The grant is one of 12 totaling $155 million to be issued by the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse to form the Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network.

The network will include 10 research centers, including one at Brown, and two support centers, the NIH said.

Rosemarie Martin, an assistant professor in Brown’s School of Public Health and the principal investigator on the grant, said the pilot project will fill a critical gap in the effort to better treat “opioid use disorder,” or OUD, among people in the correctional system, including those on parole and probation.

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Research shows that those in the criminal justice system are prone to overdose, according to Martin. Twenty-one percent of fatal opioid overdose victims in Rhode Island in 2014 and 2015 had been incarcerated in the two years prior to their deaths, according to a Brown news release.

“For years, the standard of care for OUD in the criminal justice system was insufficient and in need of reform, but that is now starting to change,” Martin said in a statement. “Rhode Island is the first state in the nation to offer all three forms of [Food and Drug Administration-approved] medication for OUD in all of its correctional institutions. With this grant, we’re extending that same kind of evidence-based intervention to a similarly vulnerable population of people on parole and probation.”

Brown said a program to offer medication for OUD to Rhode Island’s entire prison population began in 2016. Two years later, a study showed the program was associated with a 61% decrease in post-incarceration deaths statewide and a 12% decrease in overall opioid deaths during the study period.

Researchers say extending a similar program from those in correctional institutions to formerly incarcerated people in community-based supervision has the potential to improve outcomes for a larger set of people.

In Rhode Island, the new pilot program will be implemented through a partnership among Brown, the R.I. Department of Corrections, the University of Rhode Island, and CODAC, a nonprofit, community-based provider of OUD medications in New England.

The research team will work with probation and parole officers, providing them with further specialized training on how to identify people in need of treatment and helping to obtain that treatment. Community treatment partners will receive additional training in working with criminal justice populations. The program will also recruit peer navigators – people who have experience with OUD and medication-assisted treatment – to help clients enter and stay in treatment.

In addition, the team will evaluate the effects of the program on treatment engagement, rearrest, continued illicit drug use and fatal and nonfatal overdoses.

Programs also will be implemented in Philadelphia and Brunswick, N.C., in partnership with Temple University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

“We wanted to be able to demonstrate how this model is going to hold up in different types of settings, and the places we chose give us demographic diversity,” Martin said. “The goal is to understand what works in which settings.”

William Hamilton is PBN staff writer and special projects editor. You can follow him on Twitter @waham or email him at hamilton@pbn.com.

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