When I've seen people mandated into treatement programs or otherwise confined in situations where they couldn't use their drug of choice, that doesn't mean that they kick their addiction, just that they are situationally prevented from using. Nothing changes in their thinking. Successful drug rehabilitation is voluntary, or it doesn't work.
I think retoxification is, in this curcumstance, a realistic response to a genuine risk. These inmates have spent their entire sentence craving their drug of choice, and the first thing they do when they get free will be to go and get some. These aren't usually folks you can expect to think about concentrations, weigh out doses, or otherwise do math. They'll just take their customary dose, and in this circumstance it may kill them, and is very likely to result in expensive emergency treatment.
Makes sense to offer methadone. Their tolerance won't drop to the point where their customary dose kills them or puts them in Emergency, and they MAY choose to keep up with the methadone at a clinic rather than stealing your TV to pay for their next fix. Makes sense to me.
As for the methadone vending machine, I think that's a thoroughly bad idea. Regardless of security, there needs to be a caregiver involved in the dispensing process. The machine isn't going to be capable of determining if the inmate is already too sedated, from other drugs or from dose trading, to benefit from a dose, and while a caregiver can get to know patients and patient behaviors and thus know who needs lots of monitoring, a machine can just identify and dispense. This is a system that doesn't want to pay nurses to do the dispensing, but wants the benefit that nurses would bring.
A
