To protect people with addiction from discrimination, the Justice Dept. turns to a long-overlooked tool: the ADA.
"Increasingly, Justice Department attorneys are leveraging the law to try to overcome some of the rampant discrimination that people with substance use disorders face. The cases typically center on people who are penalized because they take medication for opioid addiction — treatments that are considered the gold-standard — and on people who are denied those medications, particularly in the criminal justice system. The underlying argument rests on the idea that imposing barriers on treatment for a disability is tantamount to doing so on the basis of the disability itself." STAT.