The city of Detroit is launching "quick response teams" to help people with opioid addictions.
Firefighters who respond to overdoses will make referrals to the teams.
Those teams will try to follow up with each patient in person, either immediately at the emergency department, or within a day or two where they are living.
Detroit Deputy Mayor Todd Bettison said this will be a holistic approach that goes much further than just saving lives with doses of Narcan.
"The wrap-around services — to get them the aftercare treatment — to get them the intervention that will ultimately break the bond and free them from the addiction — that's what's the game changer," he said.
Linda Davis is a founder of Face Addiction Now. She said the program recognizes that addiction is a serious disease requiring sustained treatment, and that people in addiction can't be expected to walk into a building asking for help. The help has to come to them.
"We need to do better as a community," she said.
Davis said the program will offer people a continuum of care that treats every aspect of a person "until they can walk alone." That may start with offering information about safer opioid use and clean needles, Davis said, as well as food and housing assistance.
But she said people with addiction typically want to leave the addiction behind, and they will eventually reach out to do that, "when they are ready."
Detroit is paying for the new program with its share of opioid lawsuit settlement funds. That's money from a series of legal settlements with companies that manufactured and distributed the drugs.
