WOONSOCKET – A national PBS NewsHour audience is about to meet a Woonsocket woman named Jessica Vega.
Last fall, Vega was one of the 50 people staying at OpenDoors’ emergency shelter on Cumberland Street in Woonsocket. She was 44, homeless for the first time in her life, and in constant pain from a surgery that had damaged her bladder and pelvis. Every day she walked to the liquor store with her walker and bought liquor, and every day she finished it before she got back.
In January, a case manager told her about She Thrives, an OpenDoors program that pairs housing and recovery support with GLP-1 medication, the class of drugs best known for treating diabetes and obesity, which a growing body of research suggests also quiets cravings for alcohol. Vega says she didn’t believe it.
“I thought, this girl is crazy,” she said. “I thought they were lying to me.”
She took the first injection anyway. That day was the last day she drank. “It was like a miracle,” she said. “It was like they changed my head.”
She is careful about how much credit she gives the medication.
“It does 90 percent,” she said. “I have to put the other 10 percent.”
Since January, Vega has moved out of the shelter and into an apartment with her daughter. Her children, who had put her out of the house and stopped speaking to her, now call and visit. It is the first time since 2002 that she has gone five months without a drink, let alone seven.“We’ve been able to offer this treatment at our shelters, and I have seen it make a tremendous difference,” said Dina Bruce, Deputy Director of OpenDoors and a certified peer recovery specialist. “Jessica was able to escape homelessness, recover, and then move on and reunite with her family. That is what we hope for everyone.”
OpenDoors became the first social service agency in the country to offer GLP-1 medication as part of addiction treatment last April, according to a news release from Nick Horton, of Open Doors. Early results show a 72 percent reduction in self-reported cravings after eight months, and the model is now the subject of an upcoming randomized controlled trial with researchers from Brown University Health.
Vega has a direct answer for those who say the science is not settled.
“If they don’t try, how are they going to know it’s going to work?” she said. “This medication is going to change a lot of lives, for sure.”
OpenDoors operates the 50-bed emergency shelter at 181 Cumberland St. in Woonsocket, in a city-owned building with funding from the Rhode Island Executive Office of Housing. OpenDoors is a Rhode Island nonprofit providing housing, shelter, recovery and reentry services statewide.
