By Nicole Perez   (CJ475 Advanced Multimedia Journalism)

 ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – The University of New Mexico’s Student Health and Counseling Center is home to the only college student-specific opiate addiction treatment center in the Southwest, a region where addiction rates have soared over the past decade. 

The Suboxone Program and Policy, which only accepts UNM students, quietly opened its doors to a few patients in 2007, and has since treated a spectrum of 40 patients who have done everything from ingesting Percocet or Oxycontin for a few months to intravenously injecting heroin for many years.

“It’s not uncommon for people to come in while they’re in withdrawal, and they’re usually very sick and very upset,” said Barbara Krause, SHAC’s supervisor of medical services. “We like to prepare for it because we think that’s a better time, but we also know that there’s a window where someone is really ready for treatment.”

Students seeking help must go through an extensive screening process to be accepted into the program. They must give a detailed medical and drug-use history, complete a urine test and sign a consent form where they agree to counseling, as well as other support services.

If accepted to UNM’s program, students are prescribed Suboxone, a prescription drug that curbs the brain’s ability to sense pleasure from opiate use. Patients typically meet with a doctor every day for the first week, and at least every two weeks after that. They also regularly receive counseling.

Krause said students will continue taking Suboxone anywhere from a few weeks to four years.

“The reason for the longer end is that as they slowly get off medication, it gives them time to regroup their life, work on their coping strategies, see the therapist, there are a lot of things that have to be done in their life,” Krause said. “This gives them a safe time away to be able to do that.”

Suboxone users will experience withdrawal if they stop using the medication, but cannot get high while taking it, according to doctors. Unlike methadone, users can take the medication without a doctor’s assistance.

“Suboxone created this whole avenue of outpatient treatment for opiate dependency, because of the nature of the medication,” said Laura Allen, an addictionologist who works at SHAC. Suboxone was approved for use in the United States in 2001.

According to a 2011 SHAC survey, 8 percent of UNM students have used prescription drugs recreationally. Krause said this rate is in keeping with other university campuses across the nation. According to an Albuquerque Opioid Needs Assessment published in June 2011,  residents in Bernaillio County who were 18-25 years old – UNM’s primary demographic – were the most likely to abuse prescription pain pills.

The same study found the number of young people dying from drug overdoses has risen over the past decade: 2 percent of New Mexicans under 21 had died of a drug overdose between 2000-2004, whereas 8 percent died of a drug overdose from 2004-2008. The number jumped to 12 percent in 2009.

“We think New Mexico may be higher in terms of numbers, but it’s really a nationwide trend,” Krause said.

A White House National Survey on Drug Use estimates that 7.7 percent of people between 18 and 24 have illegally used painkillers, but there is no comprehensive, national university estimate. 

Krause said SHAC director Beverly Kloeppel realized opiate addiction could be a problem for students, so she and Kloeppel opened the clinic at SHAC in 2007 with the help of other doctors and counselors.

The program now has three prescribing doctors and four counselors, and five students are currently being treated.

Programs similar to SHAC’s can be found at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Duke University in South Carolina. Krause said she has presented UNM’s Suboxone program model to other southwest universities multiple times, but to her knowledge, none of them were interested. According to a 2011 White House study, the western region of the United States is home to the most illegal drug use.

The Suboxone program is integrated into SHAC, so there is no separate funding. SHAC is primarily funded by the Student Activities Fee. Krause said that although it’s hard to tell exactly how much money is spent on the Suboxone program, they do know that it costs more per student than other health programs.

“There might be a time we couldn’t afford to do it, if we got really huge cutbacks and were really limited with providers, we might have to make a decision we can’t offer this, because it does take a lot of time for a small number of patients,” Krause said.

The group considered nixing the program in the spring because they weren’t sure if it was feasible, but, instead, the group changed its policy and had medical doctors and counselors collaborate more often.

Krause said they decided to continue because some UNM students have no other options. The federal government limits how much Suboxone can be prescribed, so most treatment centers have extensive waiting lists.

“You can get a list of physicians who prescribe it from the Suboxone website, and what I’ll hear from students is that they’ll just start going down the list, and often-times they’re not able to accept more patients,” Krause said. “There’s kind of a bottleneck in terms of patients getting access.”

She said the success of the program is reliant on counseling services as well as the prescription and physiological care. Clinical Counselor Ruben Zurita, who is one of four counselors assigned Suboxone patients, said addiction often masks deeper issues of self-worth, family and social acceptance.

“There’s this idea that if someone is under the influence of substances, it is used to medicate something else, or it can mask something else, so until it’s removed we can’t really see what’s underneath it,” said Stephanie McIver, Director of Counseling Services.

Krause said overall the program has been a huge success.

“The majority of students have been able to finish school, have gone off Suboxone successfully and have moved on,” she said. “There are some students who needed to go to a higher level of care, certainly some students relapsed, but we have some pretty incredible success stories of some students who have done really well and moved on, it’s really rewarding.”

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