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New grant wave forming for Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT)

A new grant wave is forming. An unexpected and shocking epidemic of heroin and prescription opioid addiction has erupted across America and the federal response is going to be a huge increase in funding for treatment and related services.

We’ve already seen signs of the grant wave in HRSA’s Substance Abuse Service Expansion program, which was designed to focus on “Medication-assisted Treatment in opioid use disorders.” Last week, the Obama Administration proposed a new $1 billion heroin treatment initiative involving pass-through grants to the states, which will in turn issue RFPs to local treatment providers, most of which will be nonprofits.

The new Obama initiative is to fund more medication-assisted treatment (MAT). Unlike the old methadone approach, MAT combines behavioral therapy with more modern medications to treat substance abuse disorders. While the Obama initiative is clearly aimed at treatment providers, peripheral grants are sure to become available for ancillary services like outreach, engagement, education and case management, most of which can be implemented by virtually any human services nonprofit.

Unlike many of President Obama’s proposals, the MAT grant initiative is likely to gain strong and quick bipartisan support in Congress, because vast stretches of rural America, as well as many suburbs and cities, are being overwhelmed by heroin, prescription opioid addiction, and concomitant ODs, often in the seemingly most unlikely of places. This includes over 400 ODs in New Hampshire in 2015. This bucolic state is not usually associated with a 22-year old woman overdosing in a squalid Nashua alley.

Listen to this heart-wrenching NRP story about how a middle aged and middle class New Hampshire makeup artist’s step daughter died. The makeup artist specializes in “painting” the presidential candidates that inundate NH every four years; she’s made-up everyone from Bernie Sanders to Mario Rubio this year. Each candidate has gotten an earful of the the addiction/OD crisis while captive in her chair.

In addition, almost every Democratic and Republican presidential candidate, with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton, seems to have been personally touched by the addiction and/or OD of a child, another relative, or a friend. It’s like Traffic writ large. Carly Fiorina and Chris Cristie regularly tell OD anecdotes as part of the their stump speeches, while Bernie and the now-out-of-the-race Rand Paul take a libertarian stand that prefers treatment over legal sanctions regarding substance abuse disorders.

When Bernie and Rand somehow agree on a major domestic policy issue, you know that the problem transcends politics. The US long-ago lost its 40-year “War on Drugs.” After over four decades of draconian law enforcement and incarceration that disproportionately affects communities of color, the net result is that heroin is actually cheaper than ever—the Washington Post reports that a bag of heroin costs less than a pack of cigarettes in much of America! High cigarette taxes are part of the reason, but heroin is not taxed. Taken together, these trends point to the need for nonprofits to be nimble enough to catch this cresting grant tsunami.

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