SEATTLE — Practitioners burning sacred herbs for patients seeking addiction treatment. Tribal sweat lodges where Native Americans can meditate and purify their bodies. Gardens where rehab residents can grow their own medicinal plants.
Down the Pacific Coast, along the Salish Sea and across the inland Northwest, tribes and Native health providers say they have historically found success integrating cultural resources and traditions with Western medicines to treat substance use disorders. Studies, while limited, have found positive effects from culture-based interventions for addiction treatment.
But fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin, has become a particularly difficult scourge to eradicate.
Across the United States, the American Indian and Alaska Native population had the highest drug overdose death rates, with a 33% increase in drug overdose deaths from 2020 through 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year. Many of these overdoses stemmed from polysubstance use — mostly people unknowingly taking drugs mixed or cut with other substances, like fentanyl.