Speaking via videoconference at the virtually-held Rx Drug and Heroin Abuse Summit in April, National Institutes of Health director, Dr. Francis Collins, discussed myriad challenges in service provision for people living with substance use disorder (SUD) in the context of the novel coronavirus pandemic. He spoke with the director of the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Nora Volkow, as they addressed questions previously submitted by summit attendees. Emphasizing its strain on people living with SUD, Volkow described the complicating effect of the pandemic on efforts to rein in opioid overdose deaths.
“We immediately can recognize the unique challenges of COVID-19 for people having an addiction,” said Volkow. “Some of these are structural; the healthcare system is not prepared to take care of them. They relate also to stigma and social issues. The concept of social distancing makes such people even more vulnerable because it interferes with many of the support systems that can help them to reach recovery. And, on top of that, drugs themselves negatively influence human physiology, making one more vulnerable to getting infected and more vulnerable to worse outcomes. So that’s why there is tremendous concern about these two epidemics colliding with one another.”
Collins and Volkow also discussed the effect of the pandemic on SUD research, which Volkow, who works on the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long Term (HEAL) project, said has been largely halted due to the stress placed on the medical system. Additionally, researchers studying inmate populations are no longer able to enter facilities, and institutional review boards, she said, have in some cases stopped reviewing applications for clinical studies.
“The issue now is how can we become creative and use virtual technologies,” she said, “to advance some of the goals that we aim to achieve with the HEAL initiative.”
Sources
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/04/21/coping-with-the-collision-of-public-health-crises-covid-19-and-substance-use-disorders/
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-1212