Joe Wright
Director of Addiction Treatment
Joe Wright, MD, is an internal medicine and addiction medicine physician who serves as the director of addiction treatment for Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. After attending the University of California, Santa Cruz, he began his career in public health responding to the HIV epidemic in San Francisco through the 1990s; and after taking science classes at San Francisco State University and working at an immunology lab at the National Institutes of Health, he went to medical school at Harvard Medical School. As a student, he was a regular commentator for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and researched the early history of activism by and for people with AIDS. He trained in internal medicine, with additional training in HIV and primary care, at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where he then served as an attending physician and a core member of the primary care teaching faculty. He came to BHCHP in 2015 to respond to the opioid overdose crisis. At BHCHP, in addition to direct care at several sites, he supervises an interdisciplinary team providing medication for opioid use disorder and a project supporting incarcerated and recently released people. He also periodically serves on the inpatient addiction consult service at Boston Medical Center. Dr. Wright has interests in increasing access to low-barrier addiction treatment and improving retention in care; and creating models of care that integrate medical interventions with trauma care, empowerment, mutual aid, and recovery as each person defines it.