New Mexico has been slow to spend millions of dollars set aside by the Legislature for drug and alcohol treatment in jails and prisons, legislative analysts wrote in a report released Wednesday.

The Legislature in the last several years has invested over $136 million to provide medication-assisted treatment to individuals involved in the criminal legal system to treat opioid and alcohol-use disorders. But most of it hasn’t been spent and “few adults have received services in comparison to how many adults need the services,” Allegra Hernandez, a Legislative Finance Committee fiscal analyst, told lawmakers on the Health and Human Services subcommittee Wednesday when presenting the results of the report.

Medication-assisted treatment helps reduce opioid use, prevent overdoses and reduce co

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