Withdrawal from methadone in US prisons: Cruel and unusual?

published on May 28, 2015 by Drs. M-J Milloy and Evan Wood in The Lancet

In the USA, as in many other settings, the main societal response to the harms of opioid addiction is arrest and imprisonment. The so-called war on drugs has contributed to an era of mass incarceration, in which about one in every 100 US citizens, almost all poor, many from racial minority groups and many who use illicit drugs, are currently detained in jails or prisons. The USA not only has the world’s highest rate of incarceration, but treats opioid-addicted prisoners very differently from those in prisons in other countries.