World Briefing | Europe: Russia: Orthodox Leader Presses for More Adoptions

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The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church used his Christmas address on Monday to encourage Russians to adopt orphans, as the country adjusts to a decision to bar Americans from adopting Russian children. The ban, which is retaliation for American legislation intended to punish Russian human rights violators, drew criticism, including from some government officials, largely because 120,000 children in Russia are awaiting adoption. “How important it is that our people should gladly, with a special feeling of gratitude to God, take orphans into their families,” Patriarch Kirill I said in a recorded address broadcast for Orthodox Christmas on Monday. “We should not have orphans in our country,” he added.


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Google’s Rivals Say F.T.C. Antitrust Ruling Missed the Point

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WASHINGTON — One of the more surprising conclusions drawn by the Federal Trade Commission when it dropped its nearly two-year antitrust investigation into Google last week was that Google, far from harming consumers, had actually helped them.







Alex Wong/Getty Images

Jon Leibowitz, right, the Federal Trade Commission chairman, speaking last week after the decision was announced.






But some critics of the inquiry now contend that the commission found no harm in Google’s actions because it was looking at the wrong thing.


Instead of considering harm to people who come to Google to search for information, Google’s competitors and their supporters say that the government should have been looking at whether Google’s actions harmed its real customers — the companies that pay billions of dollars each year to advertise on Google’s site.


In its reports, the F.T.C. did not detail how it defined harm or what quantitative measures it had used to determine that Google users were better off.


But interviews with people on all sides of the investigation — government officials, Google supporters, advocates for Microsoft and other competitors, and antitrust experts and economists — show that many of the yardsticks the commission used to measure its outcomes were remarkably similar to Google’s own. Not surprisingly, they cast Google in a favorable light.


At issue were changes that Google made in recent years to its popular search page. Google makes frequent adjustments to the formulas that determine what results are generated when a user enters a search. Currently, it makes more than 500 changes a year, or more than one each day.


Users rarely notice the changes in the formulas, or algorithms, that generate search results, but businesses do. If a change in the formulas causes a business to rank lower in the order of results generated by a search, it is likely to miss potential customers.


What customers are now seeing reflects changes in the format of Google results. For certain categories of searches — travel information, shopping comparisons and financial data, for example — Google has begun presenting links to its own related services.


People close to the investigation said that Google had presented the F.T.C. with the results of tests with focus groups hired by an outside firm to review different versions of a Google search results page. After Google acquired ITA, a travel search business, in 2011, it began testing a new way to display flight results.


The company asked test users to compare side-by-side examples of a results page with just the familiar 10 blue links to specialty travel sites with a page that had at the top a box containing direct links to airlines and fares.


People who reviewed the Google data said tests with hundreds of people showed that fewer than one in five users preferred the page with links only. Users said they liked the box of flight results, so Google reasoned that making the change was better for the consumer.


“There is a deep science to search evaluation,” Amit Singhal, a senior vice president who oversees Google’s search operation, said in an interview on Friday. “A lot of work goes into every change we make.”


But the changes were not better for companies or alternative travel sites that were pushed off the first page of results by Google’s flight box and associated links. By pushing links to competing sites lower, Google might be making things easier for people who come to it for free search. But it also is having a negative effect on competitors, shutting off traffic for those sites.


Drawing fewer customers as a result of Google’s free links, those competitors are forced to advertise more to draw traffic. And advertisers who aren’t competitors have fewer places to go to reach consumers, meaning Google can use its market power to raise advertising prices.


“There might be no consumer harm if Google eliminates Yelp,” said one Microsoft advocate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the likelihood of further interactions with the F.T.C. “But advertisers certainly are harmed.”


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Japan’s Cleanup After a Nuclear Accident Is Denounced

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Ko Sasaki for The New York Times


Bags of contaminated soil outside the Naraha-Minami school near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.







NARAHA, Japan — The decontamination crews at a deserted elementary school here are at the forefront of what Japan says is the most ambitious radiological cleanup the world has seen, one that promised to draw on cutting-edge technology from across the globe.








Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Workers reflected in the glass of the Naraha-Minami Elementary School






But much of the work at the Naraha-Minami Elementary School, about 12 miles away from the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, tells another story. For eight hours a day, construction workers blast buildings with water, cut grass and shovel dirt and foliage into big black plastic bags — which, with nowhere to go, dot Naraha’s landscape like funeral mounds.


More than a year and a half since the nuclear crisis, much of Japan’s post-Fukushima cleanup remains primitive, slapdash and bereft of the cleanup methods lauded by government scientists as effective in removing harmful radioactive cesium from the environment.


Local businesses that responded to a government call to research and develop decontamination methods have found themselves largely left out. American and other foreign companies with proven expertise in environmental remediation, invited to Japan in June to show off their technologies, have similarly found little scope to participate.


Recent reports in the local media of cleanup crews dumping contaminated soil and leaves into rivers has focused attention on the sloppiness of the cleanup.


“What’s happening on the ground is a disgrace,” said Masafumi Shiga, president of Shiga Toso, a refurbishing company based in Iwaki, Fukushima. The company developed a more effective and safer way to remove cesium from concrete without using water, which could repollute the environment. “We’ve been ready to help for ages, but they say they’ve got their own way of cleaning up,” he said.


Shiga Toso’s technology was tested and identified by government scientists as “fit to deploy immediately,” but it has been used only at two small locations, including a concrete drain at the Naraha-Minami school.


Instead, both the central and local governments have handed over much of the 1 trillion yen decontamination effort to Japan’s largest construction companies. The politically connected companies have little radiological cleanup expertise and critics say they have cut corners to employ primitive — even potentially hazardous — techniques.


The construction companies have the great advantage of available manpower. Here in Naraha, about 1,500 cleanup workers are deployed every day to power-spray buildings, scrape soil off fields, and remove fallen leaves and undergrowth from forests and mountains, according to an official at the Maeda Corporation, which is in charge of the cleanup.


That number, the official said, will soon rise to 2,000, a large deployment rarely seen on even large-sale projects like dams and bridges.


The construction companies suggest new technologies may work, but are not necessarily cost-effective.


“In such a big undertaking, cost-effectiveness becomes very important,” said Takeshi Nishikawa, an executive based in Fukushima for the Kajima Corporation, Japan’s largest construction company. The company is in charge of the cleanup in the city of Tamura, a part of which lies within the 12-mile exclusion zone. “We bring skills and expertise to the project,” Mr. Nishikawa said.


Kajima also built the reactor buildings for all six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, leading some critics to question why control of the cleanup effort has been left to companies with deep ties to the nuclear industry.


Also worrying, industry experts say, are cleanup methods used by the construction companies that create loose contamination that can become airborne or enter the water.


At many sites, contaminated runoff from cleanup projects is not fully recovered and is being released into the environment, multiple people involved in the decontamination work said.


Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo.



This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 8, 2013

Earlier versions of this article misspelled the name of the construction company in charge of the cleanup of the city of Tamura. It is the Kajima Corporation, not Kashima.



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Vital Signs: Perceptions: Babies Seem to Pick Up Language in Utero

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A new study suggests that babies learn bits of their native languages even before they are born.

A baby develops the ability to hear by about 30 weeks’ gestation, so he can make out his mother’s voice for the last two months of pregnancy. Researchers tested 40 American and 40 Swedish newborns to see if they could distinguish between English and Swedish vowel sounds. The study is scheduled for future publication in the journal Acta Paediatrica.

The scientists gave the babies pacifiers that counted the number of sucks they made. As the babies sucked, they listened to Swedish and English vowel sounds; the more they sucked, the more the sounds were played. The researchers inferred the babies’ interest in the sound by the amount of sucking.

American babies consistently sucked more often when hearing Swedish vowel sounds, suggesting that the infants had not heard them before, and Swedish babies sucked more when hearing English vowels.

Learning so quickly after birth was unlikely, the researchers concluded, so the babies’ understanding the difference between native and nonnative sounds could be attributed only to prenatal learning.

“Even in late gestation, babies are doing what they’ll be doing throughout infancy and childhood — learning about language,” said the lead author, Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University.


The researchers set up a system to test how well an infant recognizes vowel sounds. They measured the number of times a baby sucked on a pacifier that triggered various vowel sounds. The babies tended to suck faster on their pacifier when they heard the vowel sounds of a foreign language as opposed to the one their mother’s spoke.
Read More..

Vital Signs: Perceptions: Babies Seem to Pick Up Language in Utero

Label:

A new study suggests that babies learn bits of their native languages even before they are born.

A baby develops the ability to hear by about 30 weeks’ gestation, so he can make out his mother’s voice for the last two months of pregnancy. Researchers tested 40 American and 40 Swedish newborns to see if they could distinguish between English and Swedish vowel sounds. The study is scheduled for future publication in the journal Acta Paediatrica.

The scientists gave the babies pacifiers that counted the number of sucks they made. As the babies sucked, they listened to Swedish and English vowel sounds; the more they sucked, the more the sounds were played. The researchers inferred the babies’ interest in the sound by the amount of sucking.

American babies consistently sucked more often when hearing Swedish vowel sounds, suggesting that the infants had not heard them before, and Swedish babies sucked more when hearing English vowels.

Learning so quickly after birth was unlikely, the researchers concluded, so the babies’ understanding the difference between native and nonnative sounds could be attributed only to prenatal learning.

“Even in late gestation, babies are doing what they’ll be doing throughout infancy and childhood — learning about language,” said the lead author, Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University.


The researchers set up a system to test how well an infant recognizes vowel sounds. They measured the number of times a baby sucked on a pacifier that triggered various vowel sounds. The babies tended to suck faster on their pacifier when they heard the vowel sounds of a foreign language as opposed to the one their mother’s spoke.
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The Lede Blog: Video of Chinese Censorship Protest

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A video report from Euronews on an anti-censorship protest on Monday in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province.

As my colleague Edward Wong reports, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the headquarters of a newspaper office in southern China on Monday to register their anger at the censorship of a recent editorial.

Video of the demonstration, posted online by international news organizations and Chinese bloggers, showed the protesters carrying white and yellow chrysanthemums, a flower that symbolizes mourning, and banners that read: “Get rid of censorship. The Chinese people want freedom.”

Video uploaded to a Chinese social media site on Monday showed a protest outside the offices of Southern Weekend, a relatively liberal newspaper in Guangzhou.

One video clip uploaded to a Chinese social media site and later copied to YouTube showed that the event was documented by a number of photographers, including at least one uniformed police officer.

People showed their support for journalists who had declared a strike to protest what they called overbearing censorship.

Hang Tung Chow of Labour Action China, a nongovernmental organization based in Hong Kong, posted copies of several images and video clips of the protest originally uploaded to Chinese social media accounts on her Twitter feed.

Angry journalists at the Southern Weekend newspaper have called for the removal of Tuo Zhen, the top propaganda official in Guangdong, blamed for censoring a New Year’s editorial that was supposed to have called for greater respect for rights enshrined in China’s Constitution. One video clip uploaded to YouTube on Sunday showed a lone man protesting outside the newspaper building holding a sign reading: “Tuo Step Down!”

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At Disney Parks, a Bracelet Meant to Build Loyalty (and Sales)

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ORLANDO, Fla. — Imagine Walt Disney World with no entry turnstiles. Cash? Passé: Visitors would wear rubber bracelets encoded with credit card information, snapping up corn dogs and Mickey Mouse ears with a tap of the wrist. Smartphone alerts would signal when it is time to ride Space Mountain without standing in line.




Fantasyland? Hardly. It happens starting this spring.


Disney in the coming months plans to begin introducing a vacation management system called MyMagic+ that will drastically change the way Disney World visitors — some 30 million people a year — do just about everything.


The initiative is part of a broader effort, estimated by analysts to cost between $800 million and $1 billion, to make visiting Disney parks less daunting and more amenable to modern consumer behavior. Disney is betting that happier guests will spend more money.


“If we can enhance the experience, more people will spend more of their leisure time with us,” said Thomas O. Staggs, chairman of Disney Parks and Resorts.


The ambitious plan moves Disney deeper into the hotly debated terrain of personal data collection. Like most major companies, Disney wants to have as much information about its customers’ preferences as it can get, so it can appeal to them more efficiently. The company already collects data to use in future sales campaigns, but parts of MyMagic+ will allow Disney for the first time to track guest behavior in minute detail.


Did you buy a balloon? What attractions did you ride and when? Did you shake Goofy’s hand, but snub Snow White? If you fully use MyMagic+, databases will be watching, allowing Disney to refine its offerings and customize its marketing messages.


Disney is aware of potential privacy concerns, especially regarding children. The plan, which comes as the federal government is trying to strengthen online privacy protections, could be troublesome for a company that some consumers worry is already too controlling.


But Disney has decided that MyMagic+ is essential. The company must aggressively weave new technology into its parks — without damaging the sense of nostalgia on which the experience depends — or risk becoming irrelevant to future generations, Mr. Staggs said. From a business perspective, he added, MyMagic+ could be “transformational.”


Aside from benefiting Disney’s bottom line, the initiative could alter the global theme parks business. Disney is not the first vacation company to use wristbands equipped with radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips. Great Wolf Resorts, an operator of 11 water parks in North America, has been using them since 2006. But Disney’s global parks operation, which has an estimated 121.4 million admissions a year and generates $12.9 billion in revenue, is so huge that it can greatly influence consumer behavior.


“When Disney makes a move, it moves the culture,” said Steve Brown, chief operating officer for Lo-Q, a British company that provides line management and ticketing systems for theme parks and zoos.


Disney World guests currently plod through entrance turnstiles, redeeming paper tickets, and then decide what to ride; food and merchandise are bought with cash or credit cards. (Disney hotel key cards can also be used to charge items.) People race to FastPass kiosks, which dispense a limited number of free line-skipping tickets. But gridlock quickly sets in and most people wait. And wait.


In contrast, MyMagic+ will allow users of a new Web site and app — called My Disney Experience — to preselect three FastPasses before they leave home for rides or V.I.P. seating for parades, fireworks and character meet-and-greets. Orlando-bound guests can also preregister for RFID bracelets. These so-called MagicBands will function as room key, park ticket, FastPass and credit card.


MagicBands can also be encoded with all sorts of personal details, allowing for more personalized interaction with Disney employees. Before, the employee playing Cinderella could say hello only in a general way. Now — if parents opt in — hidden sensors will read MagicBand data, providing information needed for a personalized greeting: “Hi, Angie,” the character might say without prompting. “I understand it’s your birthday.”


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At Disney Parks, a Bracelet Meant to Build Loyalty (and Sales)

Label:




ORLANDO, Fla. — Imagine Walt Disney World with no entry turnstiles. Cash? Passé: Visitors would wear rubber bracelets encoded with credit card information, snapping up corn dogs and Mickey Mouse ears with a tap of the wrist. Smartphone alerts would signal when it is time to ride Space Mountain without standing in line.




Fantasyland? Hardly. It happens starting this spring.


Disney in the coming months plans to begin introducing a vacation management system called MyMagic+ that will drastically change the way Disney World visitors — some 30 million people a year — do just about everything.


The initiative is part of a broader effort, estimated by analysts to cost between $800 million and $1 billion to make visiting Disney parks less daunting and more amenable to modern consumer behavior. Disney is betting that happier guests will spend more money.


“If we can enhance the experience, more people will spend more of their leisure time with us,” said Thomas O. Staggs, chairman of Disney Parks and Resorts.


The ambitious plan moves Disney deeper into the hotly debated terrain of personal data collection. Like most major companies, Disney wants to have as much information about its customers’ preferences as it can get, so it can appeal to them more efficiently. The company already collects data to use in future sales campaigns, but parts of MyMagic+ will allow Disney for the first time to track guest behavior in minute detail.


Did you buy a balloon? What attractions did you ride and when? Did you shake Goofy’s hand, but snub Snow White? If you fully use MyMagic+, databases will be watching, allowing Disney to refine its offerings and customize its marketing messages.


Disney is aware of potential privacy concerns, especially regarding children. The plan, which comes as the federal government is trying to strengthen online privacy protections, could be troublesome for a company that some consumers worry is already too controlling.


But Disney has decided that MyMagic+ is essential. The company must aggressively weave new technology into its parks — without damaging the sense of nostalgia on which the experience depends — or risk becoming irrelevant to future generations, Mr. Staggs said. From a business perspective, he added, MyMagic+ could be “transformational.”


Aside from benefiting Disney’s bottom line, the initiative could alter the global theme parks business. Disney is not the first vacation company to use wristbands equipped with radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips. Great Wolf Resorts, an operator of 11 water parks in North America, has been using them since 2006. But Disney’s global parks operation, which has an estimated 121.4 million admissions a year and generates $12.9 billion in revenue, is so huge that it can greatly influence consumer behavior.


“When Disney makes a move, it moves the culture,” said Steve Brown, chief operating officer for Lo-Q, a British company that provides line management and ticketing systems for theme parks and zoos.


Disney World guests currently plod through entrance turnstiles, redeeming paper tickets, and then decide what to ride; food and merchandise are bought with cash or credit cards. (Disney hotel key cards can also be used to charge items.) People race to FastPass kiosks, which dispense a limited number of free line-skipping tickets. But gridlock quickly sets in and most people wait. And wait.


In contrast, MyMagic+ will allow users of a new Web site and app — called My Disney Experience — to preselect three FastPasses before they leave home for rides or V.I.P. seating for parades, fireworks and character meet-and-greets. Orlando-bound guests can also preregister for RFID bracelets. These so-called MagicBands will function as room key, park ticket, FastPass and credit card.


MagicBands can also be encoded with all sorts of personal details, allowing for more personalized interaction with Disney employees. Before, the employee playing Cinderella could say hello only in a general way. Now — if parents opt in — hidden sensors will read MagicBand data, providing information needed for a personalized greeting: “Hi, Angie,” the character might say without prompting. “I understand it’s your birthday.”


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Alarm in Albuquerque Over Plan to End Methadone for Inmates

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Mark Holm for The New York Times


Officials at New Mexico’s largest jail want to end its methadone program. Addicts like Penny Strayer hope otherwise.







ALBUQUERQUE — It has been almost four decades since Betty Jo Lopez started using heroin.




Her face gray and wizened well beyond her 59 years, Ms. Lopez would almost certainly still be addicted, if not for the fact that she is locked away in jail, not to mention the cup of pinkish liquid she downs every morning.


“It’s the only thing that allows me to live a normal life,” Ms. Lopez said of the concoction, which contains methadone, a drug used to treat opiate dependence. “These nurses that give it to me, they’re like my guardian angels.”


For the last six years, the Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico’s largest jail, has been administering methadone to inmates with drug addictions, one of a small number of jails and prisons around the country that do so.


At this vast complex, sprawled out among the mesas west of downtown Albuquerque, any inmate who was enrolled at a methadone clinic just before being arrested can get the drug behind bars. Pregnant inmates addicted to heroin are also eligible.


Here in New Mexico, which has long been plagued by one of the nation’s worst heroin scourges, there is no shortage of participants — hundreds each year — who have gone through the program.


In November, however, the jail’s warden, Ramon Rustin, said he wanted to stop treating inmates with methadone. Mr. Rustin said the program, which had been costing Bernalillo County about $10,000 a month, was too expensive.


Moreover, Mr. Rustin, a former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania and a 32-year veteran of corrections work, said he did not believe that the program truly worked.


Of the hundred or so inmates receiving daily methadone doses, he said, there was little evidence of a reduction in recidivism, one of the program’s main selling points.


“My concern is that the courts and other authorities think that jail has become a treatment program, that it has become the community provider,” he said. “But jail is not the answer. Methadone programs belong in the community, not here.”


Mr. Rustin’s public stance has angered many in Albuquerque, where drug addiction has been passed down through generations in impoverished pockets of the city, as it has elsewhere across New Mexico.


Recovery advocates and community members argue that cutting people off from methadone is too dangerous, akin to taking insulin from a diabetic.


The New Mexico office of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes an overhaul to drug policy, has implored Mr. Rustin to reconsider his stance, saying in a letter that he did not have the medical expertise to make such a decision.


Last month, the Bernalillo County Commission ordered Mr. Rustin to extend the program, which also relies on about $200,000 in state financing annually, for two months until its results could be studied further.


“Addiction needs to be treated like any other health issue,” said Maggie Hart Stebbins, a county commissioner who supports the program.


“If we can treat addiction at the jail to the point where they stay clean and don’t reoffend, that saves us the cost of reincarcerating that person,” she said.


Hard data, though, is difficult to come by — hence the county’s coming review.


Darren Webb, the director of Recovery Services of New Mexico, a private contractor that runs the methadone program, said inmates were tracked after their release to ensure that they remained enrolled at outside methadone clinics.


While the outcome was never certain, Mr. Webb said, he maintained that providing methadone to inmates would give them a better chance of staying out of jail once they were released. “When they get out, they won’t be committing the same crimes they would if they were using,” he said. “They are functioning adults.”


In a study published in 2009 in The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, researchers found that male inmates in Baltimore who were treated with methadone were far more likely to continue their treatment in the community than inmates who received only counseling.


Those who received methadone behind bars were also more likely to be free of opioids and cocaine than those who received only counseling or started methadone treatment after their release.


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Alarm in Albuquerque Over Plan to End Methadone for Inmates

Label:

Mark Holm for The New York Times


Officials at New Mexico’s largest jail want to end its methadone program. Addicts like Penny Strayer hope otherwise.







ALBUQUERQUE — It has been almost four decades since Betty Jo Lopez started using heroin.




Her face gray and wizened well beyond her 59 years, Ms. Lopez would almost certainly still be addicted, if not for the fact that she is locked away in jail, not to mention the cup of pinkish liquid she downs every morning.


“It’s the only thing that allows me to live a normal life,” Ms. Lopez said of the concoction, which contains methadone, a drug used to treat opiate dependence. “These nurses that give it to me, they’re like my guardian angels.”


For the last six years, the Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico’s largest jail, has been administering methadone to inmates with drug addictions, one of a small number of jails and prisons around the country that do so.


At this vast complex, sprawled out among the mesas west of downtown Albuquerque, any inmate who was enrolled at a methadone clinic just before being arrested can get the drug behind bars. Pregnant inmates addicted to heroin are also eligible.


Here in New Mexico, which has long been plagued by one of the nation’s worst heroin scourges, there is no shortage of participants — hundreds each year — who have gone through the program.


In November, however, the jail’s warden, Ramon Rustin, said he wanted to stop treating inmates with methadone. Mr. Rustin said the program, which had been costing Bernalillo County about $10,000 a month, was too expensive.


Moreover, Mr. Rustin, a former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania and a 32-year veteran of corrections work, said he did not believe that the program truly worked.


Of the hundred or so inmates receiving daily methadone doses, he said, there was little evidence of a reduction in recidivism, one of the program’s main selling points.


“My concern is that the courts and other authorities think that jail has become a treatment program, that it has become the community provider,” he said. “But jail is not the answer. Methadone programs belong in the community, not here.”


Mr. Rustin’s public stance has angered many in Albuquerque, where drug addiction has been passed down through generations in impoverished pockets of the city, as it has elsewhere across New Mexico.


Recovery advocates and community members argue that cutting people off from methadone is too dangerous, akin to taking insulin from a diabetic.


The New Mexico office of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes an overhaul to drug policy, has implored Mr. Rustin to reconsider his stance, saying in a letter that he did not have the medical expertise to make such a decision.


Last month, the Bernalillo County Commission ordered Mr. Rustin to extend the program, which also relies on about $200,000 in state financing annually, for two months until its results could be studied further.


“Addiction needs to be treated like any other health issue,” said Maggie Hart Stebbins, a county commissioner who supports the program.


“If we can treat addiction at the jail to the point where they stay clean and don’t reoffend, that saves us the cost of reincarcerating that person,” she said.


Hard data, though, is difficult to come by — hence the county’s coming review.


Darren Webb, the director of Recovery Services of New Mexico, a private contractor that runs the methadone program, said inmates were tracked after their release to ensure that they remained enrolled at outside methadone clinics.


While the outcome was never certain, Mr. Webb said, he maintained that providing methadone to inmates would give them a better chance of staying out of jail once they were released. “When they get out, they won’t be committing the same crimes they would if they were using,” he said. “They are functioning adults.”


In a study published in 2009 in The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, researchers found that male inmates in Baltimore who were treated with methadone were far more likely to continue their treatment in the community than inmates who received only counseling.


Those who received methadone behind bars were also more likely to be free of opioids and cocaine than those who received only counseling or started methadone treatment after their release.


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