Federal prisons are supposed to provide addiction medication. But prisoners are being punished for using it. Published in partnership with the MarshallProj
— had complained of withdrawal symptoms and said that he couldn’t stop using drugs without medication. He’d been written up twice for drug use, he said, and even sent to solitary. At one point, the prison offered him a different medication that he’d tried before and found it didn’t work. When he pushed for Suboxone, officials told him, “You may resubmit a new request closer to your release.”
When prescribed, Suboxone typically comes as a strip of film that patients dissolve under the tongue. On the illegal market behind bars, a strip is cut into 16 or 32 pieces, each of which sells for $20.“You wash clothes for people, run around, wash tennis shoes, you have sex with people,” said one man incarcerated in a federal prison that was providing Suboxone prescriptions to less than 1% of the people there as of October, according to Bureau of Prisons data.
The Marshall Project spoke to several people who said they’d endured violence or physical danger resulting from Suboxone debts.Gretchen Ertl / The Providence Journal / USA Today Network Michael Swain had been trying to get on the Bureau of Prisons’ program for eight months when he almost died of an overdose. He’d served four years of an eight-year sentence for a bank robbery that he said he committed to fund his addiction. He was using an underground supply of Suboxone at USP-Coleman, the federal prison in Florida where he was incarcerated, but it was erratic.
Even now, every time he asks the medical staff for an update on his request to receive Suboxone to treat his addiction, he said he’s told the same thing: “You have been accepted, and you are on the waiting list.”Beth Schwartzapfel is a staff writer at The Marshall Project covering criminal justice.
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