When a person who is experiencing homelessness enters an inpatient addiction treatment center it should be an immediate priority to begin gathering housing resources and a concrete plan.

It’s downright despicable that that a person recently left a facility (AMA) after a 16 day admission and was discharged to the street. He left due to boredom. The facility was a 9 bed center (due to COVID restrictions) which he reported only provided one 12 step meeting a day.

He said the facility did not have the resources to provide any other therapeutic interventions due to #COVID19, which led to severe boredom and depression, ultimately ending with him leaving the facility.

The catalyst for him seeking treatment was homelessness. This is the man I’ve been tweeting about for over a month. The same man who was stable on bupe and chose to inject fentanyl in order to have a pos. drug screen to get a bed in the hopes his housing issue would be addressed.

@ncannellf covered this man’s story last week here: https://whyy.org/articles/an-emergency-on-top-of-the-emergency-philly-drug-rehabs-grapple-with-virus-outbreaks-and-empty-beds/

Any substance use treatment program/facility that doesn’t prioritize housing is providing substandard treatment and doing their patients a disservice.