NEW ORLEANS — Elyse Stevens had a reputation for taking on complex medical cases. People who’d been battling addiction for decades. Chronic-pain patients on high doses of opioids. Sex workers and people living on the street. “Many of my patients are messy, the ones that don’t know if they want to stop using drugs or not,” said Stevens, a primary care and addiction medicine doctor. While other doctors avoided these patients, Stevens — who was familiar with the city from her time in medical school at Tulane University — sought them out. She regularly attended 6 a.m. breakfasts for homeless people, volunteered at a homeless shelter clinic on Saturdays, and, on Monday evenings, visited an abandoned Family Dollar store where advocates distributed supplies to people who use drugs. One such evening about four years ago, Charmyra Harrell arrived there limping, her right leg swollen and covered in sores. Emergency room doctors had repeatedly dismissed her, so she eased the pain with street drugs, Harrell said. Stevens cleaned her sores on Mondays for months until finally persuading Harrell to visit the clinic at University Medical Center New Orleans. There, Stevens discovered Harrell had diabetes and cancer. She agreed to prescribe Harrell pain medication — an option many doctors would automatically dismiss for fear that a patient with a history of addiction would misuse it. But Stevens was confident Harrell could hold up her end of the deal. “She told me, ‘You cannot do drugs and do your pain meds,’” Harrell recounted…
