By RYAN HAMPTON

A Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll published in July found that three in ten U.S. adults (29%) said they had someone in their family who struggled with opioid dependence. Also surprising, and encouraging, was the statistic that 90% support increasing access to opioid use disorder treatment programs in their communities.

As a person in recovery from opioid use disorder and advocate, my read on this data set is that the public support is there. Now more than ever, we need leaders in healthcare, public policy, and corporate America to have the courage to advance effective treatment options. The most inspiring example of the kind of courage we need was the recent news that one of the nation’s largest retail grocery and pharmacy chains, Albertsons, made the financial investment to train their pharmacy staff to administer buprenorphine injections (known as Sublocade) on site.

To someone who is not in the weeds on the issue of opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment programs, this may just sound like a solid business decision. But go a layer deeper and the courage is evident: Albertsons decided to invest in an underutilized treatment option (despite buprenorphine being the gold-standard in OUD treatment) that serves a highly stigmatized patient population who is often shunned at pharmacy counters nationwide. Albertsons chose to put treatment centers for an underserved and highly stigmatized patient population in the middle of their family-friendly, neighborhood grocery pharmacy chain. 

The company rightly recognized that OUD impacts every family and community in this country—including the lives of its patrons. Albertsons pushed through stigma, not leaving the overdose crisis for someone else to address, because it had the ability to provide widespread access through its pharmacies and locations across the nation.