Houston’s methadone clinics are overloaded with addicts this week after Hurricane Harvey cut off the supply to both legal and illegal drugs for days.
Many patients – old and new – are showing up without identification because they had to flee their homes in minutes as flood waters rose around them.
Most are walking miles in flooded territories to get to their methadone clinics to prevent a relapse.
And those clinics, which are now opening up two weeks after Harvey, are packed with new patients who, because the storm cut off their supply to illicit opioids, have decided to give methadone a try.
Without ID, clinics cannot treat them, but treatment centers are now working round-the-clock to care for and accommodate the massive influx of patients they are getting as a result of Harvey’s destruction.
