Doctors and public health officials in Appalachia, a region hit hard by the opioid epidemic, report a rise in relapses as those struggling with substance abuse react to forced isolation and reduced access to treatment and crucial support networks. The pandemic’s rules on sheltering in place and social distancing aggravate the drug crisis, as patients have too much unstructured time, are not able to attend recovery meetings in person, and suffer from anxiety—all triggers from those in recovery.
Treatment facilities are starting to adjust their practices to accommodate the new conditions, providing larger take-home doses of medication, using telemedicine to assess and prescribe drugs, and initiating counseling sessions by video conferencing to help at-risk communities. Maintaining access to treatment is also critical because people with substance use disorders are at heightened risk from the virus due damage caused by opioid abuse, which weakens the immune system and makes users more prone to infectious diseases.
Meanwhile, the United Nations says that while the pandemic has disrupted the global illicit drug trade in North America and Europe, it is still flourishing in the Asia-Pacific region. In Europe, tighter cross-border restrictions and tougher sheltering in place rules have made drug dealing more difficult. But in Asia, transnational crime groups have actually expanded the scale of drugs such as methamphetamine—the most popular drug in the region—and widened their distribution network while shifting to online sales.