People in Multnomah and Clackamas counties who are addicted to fentanyl will soon have a new place to go for inpatient treatment. A 16-bed center opened in East Portland on Friday. It is also the first alcohol and drug withdrawal management facility in the state that was paid for with funding from Measure 110.
“Fentanyl, as an illicitly produced substance in our street drug supply, has become an increasing problem for about four years now and it has proliferated,” said Joe Bazeghi, the director of engagement for Recovery Works NW, which is operating the new facility. “We no longer really see a lot of the more traditional street opioids that we were familiar with — heroin or pharmaceutical pills — that have made their way to the street.”
The main open area of the inpatient fentanyl detox facility in East Portland operated by Recovery Works NW.
Joe Bazeghi
Recovery Works NW has offered medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction for nearly a decade, but this is the first time they’ll be operating an inpatient facility. Bazeghi says that’s necessary because of the unique nature of fentanyl addiction.
“Tools that previously were very, very effective, that our physicians offered, that our behavioral health professionals offered, these are no longer as effective as they previously were,” Bazeghi said. “It’s far more potent and it has a different profile in how it interacts with the body and how it exits the body.”
Fentanyl is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin, according to the DEA. That means users build up a tolerance very quickly and will need to detox from using large amounts of the drug.
“People are coming in taking just undreamed of quantities of opioids into their system,” Bazeghi said.
Another complication with fentanyl detoxing is that, unlike other opioids, it can be stored in the body’s fat cells. That means it can be “released unevenly and unpredictably over a much longer period of time than 72 hours … which is part of the necessity of having this space where folks can be monitored by physicians [and] nursing staff over time.”
The facility will be staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by medical, behavioral health, and other staff. The goal is to serve at least 1,200 patients over the course of the year, which would be an 18% increase in the number of people who can be treated for recovery from fentanyl and other opioids in the Portland metro region.
Another goal of the facility is to find people housing when they leave. “One thing we know for sure is everybody that needs housing should be offered access,” Bazeghi said. “This is something Measure 110 has really helped us to facilitate. There’s so many more supported housing resources online for people that are really addressing their substance usage.”
You can listen to the whole conversation with Joe Bazeghi on “Think Out Loud” by pressing the play arrow above.
