James Dunlap & Associates LLC has filed a civil rights action against the Tennessee Health Services and Development Agency and the City of Johnson City, Tennessee, for violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
The lawsuit is being brought on behalf of opiate-addicted disabled people who live in the Johnson City area (Tri Cities Area), among an estimated 1,000 people or more–including pregnant women–being forced to drive more than 100 miles roundtrip–as often as daily–to obtain life-saving, doctor-prescribed medication. This “forced march” of disabled people is taking place because policy makers refuse to allow standard of care Methadone Maintenance Treatment (MMT) into the area despite the fact the area suffers some of the highest opiate-addiction rates in the United States. About one Johnson City area resident dies from a drug overdose every three days–a higher death rate than U.S. casualties in Irag and Afghanistan. Despite this horrendous drug overdose death rate, policymakers refuse to allow area residents convenient access to a treatment that has been recognized as the “standard of care” by the following world health organizations: The National Institute of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the World Health Organization, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Medical Association.
Apparently, because no take-home doses are allowed patients in the first 90 days of MMT treatment, policymakers see no problem in making disabled people, including pregnant women, drive more than 9,000 miles in the first 90 days of doctor-prescribed MMT treatment to save their own lives or the lives of their babies. Instead, policymakers want to force disabled people to undergo abstinence treatment (with up to 90% failure rate) or force them to use non-standard Suboxone. Suboxone can cause opiate withdrawal syndrome in a pregnant woman, if she is not already in withdrawal, which can kill her fetus. With hundreds of pregnant opiate-addicted women presenting themselves for treatment each year in the Johnson City area, how many unborn children are being harmed by the lack of access to standard of care treatment for pregnant women?
This human health catastrophe has resulted in death and human misery on a wide scale. It shows no evidence of abating without intervention by either a federal court or the U.S. Justice Department..
