I-Team investigation: ‘Opioids – Hoping for Help’

The epidemic has ravaged the country with a cruel efficiency, but it isn’t an undefeatable foe.

“The opioid epidemic is an epidemic, at this point, more people die from overdoses than gunshots or auto accidents in the United States,” said Dr. Christopher Yadron, an administrator at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, opioids are the main driver of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. In 2016, over 42,000 people in the U.S. were killed by opioids. Opioid addiction has risen steadily beginning in the mid-1990’s, and exponentially in the past decade.

Treatment centers across the country have had to take a serious look at how their conventional recovery practices are working. Some, like the Betty Ford Center, are combining the 12 step program with medication-assisted treatment.

“We’ve brought them together in a program called ‘Cor-12’ which is the comprehensive opioid response with the 12 steps. And, through a variety means we’re helping individuals get into recovery and find the hope and healing that they need from such a terrible disorder and from such a terrible epidemic,” Yadron said.

Fighting drug addiction with drugs. Yadron says the Center primarily uses Vivitrol and Suboxone, saying they diminish cravings allowing patients to gain the stability so that they can move towards self-management.

According to the non-profit, Advocates for Opioid Recovery, when it comes to opioid addiction, the abstinence-only method is not working and the evolution of the recovery community is happening now with the help of FDA approved medications.

While the Betty Ford Center has introduced medications into their treatment plan for opioid addiction, one local doctor says there’s a plant-based medication that is more effective but not legal in the U.S.

“Ibogaine works, that’s the bottom line, ibogaine works it works in the brain, it’s a neurochemical so you don’t have to practice fighting your urges, you don’t have to abstain, you are released from the cravings,” Dr. Deborah Windham, an Ibogaine advocate from Rancho Mirage.

Windham spent decades as a primary care physician. She looks at life and medicine a little differently these days. Addiction hit close to home. After seeing how Ibogaine worked for a family member, naturally as a doctor, she studied it.

“This was like antibiotics for an infection, I saw it right up there with good medicine,” Windham said.

Ibogaine is a hallucinogenic compound derived from the roots of a West African shrub, it’s a psychedelic. It’s used in pill form at clinics all over the world but it’s not available in the U.S.

“It’s a long-acting very intense psychedelic journey,” Windham said.

A journey 38-year-old Catherine Nicolino decided to take more than a year ago at a clinic in Mexico. Nicolino said she started doing drugs when she was 11, got hooked on heroin and crystal meth, and went to 22 different rehabs over the years. A year ago with nothing to lose she tried Ibogaine.

“I feel amazing now, I mean it’s not like bad things don’t happen or everything’s perfect or anything like that but, getting high doesn’t cross my mind anymore it’s a beautiful thing,” Nicolino said.

Windham has spent some time in Ibogaine clinics in Mexico studying their process and learning about the medicine. She does not distribute or administer it but, she has become an advocate because as she puts it:

“There’s hope and there’s an option,” Windham said.

The Betty Ford Center only uses FDA-approved drugs and has found them to be successful in helping people in need. Ibogaine is not on the list of approved medications in the U.S. and like other drugs people can experience serious side effects.

The bottom line, help for opioid addiction is available and there is help through a variety of options.