For over two decades I have provided weekly clinical care to prisoners at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections. This experience of meeting thousands of patients has confirmed the epidemiological data suggesting that over half of all current prisoners have an addiction problem.

About one in seven has opioid dependence, a consistent and predictable, all-consuming, chronic relapsing and potentially fatal brain disease.

The current epidemic of opioid dependence has been driven by the flooding of the market with increased prescribing of pharmaceutical opioids. Regulatory pressures that have encouraged physicians to prescribe opioids for the management of chronic pain, along with unscrupulous profit-motivated pharmaceutical industry practices, have created this problem.

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