A multinational drug company has quietly carved out a lucrative, publicly subsidized market for an expensive—and risky—medicine that the company promises can help rescue Illinois from its opioid crisis.
Vivitrol is also being dispensed by other public health officials and in private treatment clinics all across Illinois. Alkermes’s website lists at least 60 different Vivitrol providers in Chicago and the suburbs. Last year, Vivitrol was written into Governor Bruce Rauner’s “Opioid Action Plan” along with two more established drug treatments. State officials have also been testing it on prisoners in the Sheridan Correctional Center in LaSalle County since October and have indicated they hope to expand its use throughout Illinois’s prisons, public records and interviews with therapists and state officials reveal.
Vivitrol is one of only three drugs to have won federal approval for the treatment of opioid addiction.
There is also far more research on the safety and efficacy of the alternative drugs since they’ve been in use for much longer.
It’s easy to see the appeal of anything that might offer relief from the opioid crisis. Illinois isn’t the worst of the 50 states for opioid abuse, but it’s heading in the wrong direction.
Alkermes’s sales rep, Julie Naples, is a “very professional, friendly marketing person. I mean, she bends over backward to come over,” Andrews says.
