Google's Low-Tech Plan to Solve the Opioid Crisis

A rehab clinic in Ohio meant to highlight the company's futuristic approach to medicine has instead shown the value of old-school care

-  Mark Bergen

Christopher Boggs started smoking pot in his teens, moved on to cocaine, and finally settled on opioids, which allowed him to evade the drug testing program at the car factory where he worked. He sounds like a seasoned pharmacist as he ticks off the drug regimen he built up. "Any kind of opioid you could get. Oxycodone, hydromorphone, oxymorphone, fentanyl patches-just everything," he recalls. "It was real cheap and readily available."

Boggs, who's in his mid-40s, has spent his entire life in Dayton, a city whose epidemic of overdoses turned it into the face of the US's opioid crisis. He eventually went through rehab and was living clean early in 2020. When Covid-19 swept in, he lost his job and found himself caring for an ailing relative. "I don't know," he says, rubbing a hand over his shaved head. "I relapsed again."

A friend recommended a new facility in town called OneFifteen that promised a futuristic approach to drug treatment. During his stint there, Boggs awoke in his bunk bed every morning and headed downstairs for an 8 a.m. meeting with staff members, where he'd state his goals for the day. In the afternoon, he had a group meeting about "daily living skills" in which everyone was asked the same question: "What coping skills did you use today?" Boggs liked that.

He shared everything, from the pills he'd popped, to the drugs he'd injected, to his medical records. From there the information went into a database used by Verily Life Sciences LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. Verily started OneFifteen in 2019 to provide what it calls a "tech-enabled" approach to substance abuse, marking Silicon Valley's largest foray into the US's opioid epidemic. With each patient it serves, Verily gathers more data it can feed into its sophisticated software, presumably leading to novel, individualized treatment strategies the company hopes will revolutionize the way drug addiction is treated.