Los Angeles County Restricts Opioid Treatment
Amid a lawsuit from the California Attorney General’s office over inhumane conditions, including preventable deaths such as opioid overdoses, Los Angeles County has modified its policy and is scaling back access to opioid treatment. The announcement of the reduction in treatment came just a week after state Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) announced the lawsuit, which specifically cited Los Angeles County and Correctional Health Services’ failure to address the mass overdose incidents inside its jails and the limited access to the medication-assisted treatment program.
As reported elsewhere in this issue, last year was one of the deadliest years on record for the LA County Jails, according to CalMatters, which interviewed jail staff as well as obtained records from the system. [See: PLN, Feb. 2026, p. 10]. Meanwhile, Prop. 36 is surging jail populations due to increased sentences for certain drug and theft crimes. As a result, the jails now hold about 700 more people every day. Simultaneously, as the need for treatment increases, a September 16, 2025 memo from the Chief Medical Officer Sean Henderson said Correctional Health Services would be taking a pause on ordering buprenorphine, which helps to reduce cravings and prevent overdoses, in primary care.
Priority for the medication will be given to people who want it when they first enter the system. Others requesting treatment, including those who were previously being treated but dropped out and wish to re-enroll, will be placed on a waitlist. The new policy has tripled the waitlist in just six weeks, rising from 363 people on September 15 to 835 on October 31. According to the department, the average wait for treatment is 25 days. Nevertheless, the waitlist includes 471 people who have never received treatment, implying that some people have waited much longer. The department declined to tell CalMatters the longest amount of time anyone had waited.
Other detainees suffering from opioid addiction may fail to receive treatment at all. “Length of incarceration varies for each inmate,” the department wrote in a statement to CalMatters, “from just a handful of days for some and many months for others; whether an individual will access (medication-assisted treatment) during incarceration is based on their personal choice, unique case and the length of time they will remain incarcerated.”
Two physicians speaking anonymously put a more ominous tone on it, saying that detainees who do not accept treatment when they first arrive will likely never get it, even if they change their mind. Unfortunately, the moment of their arrival may be the absolute worst time to make such a critical decision, especially if they are in active withdrawal. “Patients are begging me for help,” one physician told them.
Los Angeles County allocates about $25 million each year to the opioid treatment program. In 2025, however, they allocated another $8 million acquired from opioid lawsuit settlements, though treatment availability was not increased. Instead, the same amount of money was shifted to a different need, according to a statement by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. This is despite Correctional Health Services Director Christina Ghaly’s statement in a September 10 memo that overdose deaths had risen to at least 28% of the total deaths, from just 9% in 2016.
Melissa Camacho, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California said, “I’d like to know how many people who died from overdose deaths were on the waiting list.” She added, “Having a waitlist doesn’t matter if the waitlist is too long to get treatment.”
Source: CalMatters
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