In Opioid Addiction Treatment Should Not Last a Lifetime, Percy Menzies resurrects old theories to tarnish buprenorphine-based addiction treatment. Methadone maintenance withstood similar attacks over the decades, and remains the gold standard for the most important aspect of treating opioid dependence: preventing death.
Menzies begins by claiming that a number of ideas that never had the support of modern medicine are somehow similar to buprenorphine treatment. Replacing beer with benzodiazepines? Replacing morphine with alcohol? Replacing opioids with cocaine? Where, exactly, did these programs exist, that Menzies claims were precursors for methadone maintenance?
Buprenorphine has unique properties as a partial agonist that allows for effects far beyond ‘replacement’. The ceiling effect of the drug effectively eliminates the desire to use opioids. Seeing buprenorphine only as ‘replacement therapy’ misses the point, and ignores the unique pharmacology of the medication.
Highly-regulated clinics dispense methadone for addiction treatment., and other physicians prescribe methadone for chronic pain. Menzies claims ‘it is an axiom of medicine that drugs with an addiction potential are inappropriate for the treatment of chronic conditions.’ For that reason, he claims, methadone treatment is ‘out of the ambit of mainstream medicine.’ The 250,000-plus US patients who benefit from methadone treatment would be amused by his reasoning. I suspect that the thousands of patients who experience a lifetime of chronic pain—including veterans with crushed spines and traumatic amputations—would likely NOT be amused by his suggestion that ‘opioids… were never intended to be prescribed forever.’ Those of us who treat chronic pain take our patients as they come—often with addictions and other psychiatric baggage. Pain doesn’t stop from the presence of addiction, neither does the right for some measure of relief from that pain.
Menzies cites the old stories about Vietnam veterans who returned to the US and gave up heroin, as evidence that prolonged treatment for opioid dependence is unnecessary for current addicts. But there is no similarity between the two samples in his comparison! US Servicemen forced into a jungle to engage in lethal combat use heroin for different reasons than do teenagers attending high school. Beyond the different reasons for using, after returning home, soldiers associated heroin with danger and death! Of course they were able to stop using! And that has to do with current addicts… how?
Teens in the US have no mainland to take them back. Their addiction began in their parents’ basement, and without valid treatment, too often ends in the same place.
Menzies refers to buprenorphine treatment as ‘a conundrum’ that has not had any effect on deaths from opioid dependence—a claim impossible to support without an alternative universe and a time machine. He claims that buprenorphine treatment is unsafe and plagued by diversion. In reality, most ‘diversion’ consists of self-treatment by addicts who are unable to find a physician able to take new patients under the Federal cap. In the worst cases, some addicts keep a tablet of buprenorphine in their pockets to prevent the worst of the withdrawal symptoms if heroin is not available. But even in these cases, buprenorphine inadvertently treats addicts who take the medication, preventing euphoria from heroin for up to several days and more importantly, preventing death from overdose.
Just look at the numbers. In the past ten years, about 35,000 people have died from overdose each year in the US with no buprenorphine in their bloodstream. How many people died WITH buprenorphine in their bloodstream? About 40. Even in those cases, buprenorphine was almost never the cause of death. In fact, in many of those 40 cases, the person’s life would have been saved if MORE buprenorphine had been in the bloodstream because buprenorphine blocks the respiratory depression caused by opioid agonists.
Naltrexone is a pure opioid blocker that some favor for addiction treatment because it has no abuse potential. Naltrexone compliance is very low when the medication is not injected, and naltrexone injections cost well over $1000 per month. Naltrexone may have some utility in the case of drug courts, where monthly injections are a required condition of probation. But even in those circumstances, the success of naltrexone likely benefits the most from another fact about the drug, i.e. that the deaths from naltrexone treatment are hidden on the back end. Fans of naltrexone focus, optimistically, on its ability to block heroin up to a certain dose, up to a certain length of time after taking the medication. But Australian studies of naltrexone show death rates ten times higher than with methadone when the drug is discontinued, when patients have been discharged from treatment, and short-term treatment professionals have shifted their attention to the next group of desperate but misguided patients.
The physicians who treat addiction with buprenorphine, on the other hand, follow their patients long term because they see, first-hand, the long-term nature of addiction. Menzies’ claim that ‘the longer you take it, the harder it is to stop’ has no basis in the science of buprenorphine, or in clinical practice. Patients often get to a point—after several years—when they are ready to discontinue buprenorphine. And while buprenorphine has discontinuation symptoms, the severity of those symptoms is less than stopping agonists—and unrelated to the duration of taking buprenorphine. Until that point in time, buprenorphine effectively interrupts the natural progression of the addiction to misery and death.
The physicians who prescribe buprenorphine and the practitioners at methadone clinics are the only addiction professionals who witness the true, long-term nature of opioid dependence. In contrast, too many addiction practitioners see only the front end of addiction, discharging patients after weeks or months, considering them ‘cured’… and somehow missing the familiar names in the obituary columns months or years later.
Category: relapse
Suboxone Detox is a Sucker’s Bet
First Posted 10/6/2013
I attended the US Psychiatric and Mental Health Congress meeting last week and actually attended the meetings (the event was held in Las Vegas), but I was disappointed by the absence of lectures about addiction. There are other mental health groups geared more toward addiction, but one would think that psychiatry would maintain a strong presence in the field. This was my first time at the annual meeting for this group, and so I can’t say that I’m witnessing a trend away from addiction by psychiatry—which would be a real shame.
At any rate, I had a very busy Friday and Saturday catching up with the office work I put off for a few days. So today I had to cram in a lot of non-work activities, to make sure that my life remains well-balanced. That meant watching the entire Packer game, going to the movie ‘Gravity’ complete with 3-D glasses, and then catching the latest episode of Homeland, where psychiatrists continue to gain a bad name. Thorazine injection, anyone?
So I’m beat… but I’ve been intending to write something for the past couple weeks, and I think I can knock it off fairly quickly. Readers know that I get many emails from across the country describing atrocious behavior by physicians. The latest scam? It appears that everyone with a medical clinic has a secret recipe for tapering off Suboxone.
I received an email from a person who wanted to stop Suboxone/buprenorphine for months, if not years. For people who don’t know my attitude, I tend to believe my own eyes, and also what the research shows—that over 9 out of 10 of the people who stop buprenorphine are using opioids again within one year. When people moan that ‘it is hard to stop buprenorphine’, I remind them that the reason they are TAKING buprenorphine is because they were unable to stop opioids. Why would they expect that to change? Oh- I know— counseling! That’s the line from all of the addiction insiders—that patients take buprenorphine and do ‘counseling’, and the addiction goes away.
There are two scientific findings that keep trickling out these days that are driving some people crazy— and I admit to a bit of amusement with each headline. The first set of findings concern the troubling lack of global warming over the past 8 years—including the recent headlines that polar icecaps, predicted by Gore et al. to be completely gone by now, have grown by almost a third in the past year. The other interesting findings are the several studies that failed to demonstrate an increase in sobriety in buprenorphine patients engaged in ‘counseling.’ There is real danger for people who borrow science just in order to hide behind It for an argument or two; they risk getting caught naked when the science moves in an unexpected direction!
Anyway, the person wrote to tell me that after multiple failed efforts to taper off buprenorphine on her own, she had gone to a rapid-detox clinic that promised to ‘heal’ her receptors over a few days. The $7 grand was spent, and I had no desire to ruin whatever placebo effect she would gain from the silly cocktail of nutritional supplements she purchased. So I told her that I hoped she felt better soon, not adding that she will feel better at about the same time she would have felt better without the rapid detox and nutritional supplements.
She wrote again a week later, struggling from withdrawal, and then again a few days after that to say that she went back on buprenorphine. But the good news was that she found a different doctor who SPECIALIZES in getting people off buprenorphine.
A few days later she wrote to tell me about the hundreds of dollars the visit cost— and asked if his taper schedule appeared reasonable. ‘He’s your doctor’, I explained, trying to sound neutral. I shared my belief, though, that it was a conflict of interest for doctors to sell nutrient products that they themselves prescribed, and that opioid receptors are able to return to health without the addition of trace nutrients.
A week later she wrote about yet another specialist, who this time took $800 to tell her to take 3 mg for a few days, then 2 mg for a few days, then 1 mg for a few days. She said she had to go back for another appointment for him to tell her what to do after that.
I know it sounds like I’m joking, but sadly, I’m not. More sadly, I’ve read similar messages a number of times over the past few years. I’ve stated that I would try to point out things I write that are based on science, vs. things based on personal experience, vs. what I’ve witnessed as a clinician. What I’m about to say is based on all three.
I had my own nightmare withdrawal from potent opioids when I was in treatment 13 years ago. I lost 30 pounds from my already-skinny frame at that time, having no appetite and without taking nutrient supplements. But my withdrawal ended and my receptors healed in about 6-8 week, just as in every opioid addict who I’ve assisted through detoxification. And when I’ve seen people go away for rapid detox, they complain about feeling lousy— the same amount of complaining over the same lousiness—for the same 6-8 weeks. One would think that all of this would be enough to outrage the FDA, who usually get irritated at stories about high-cost, low-yield medical procedures. But once again, the truth is even worse. For those who do manage to white-knuckle through 6-8 weeks of withdrawal, guess how many are still clean a year later? Wanna bet?
As for the warming of the planet, I’ll continue to read the science with an open mind. Maybe Gore will be right in the long run, which would be bad for the planet but good for those who give out Nobel Prizes. But we know one thing for certain now; that asserting the ice caps would be gone by 2014 was a sucker’s bet. And the same is true about promises for a rapid or gentle path through opioid withdrawal.
Chipping Suboxone
First Published 8/31/2013
One reply to my last post said I go ‘on and on’ about things that could be said with fewer words. I asked the person to send me his/her version, and I hope he does—not to prove anything, but because I appreciate the chance to learn. He wrote that his problem is the opposite– that he can’t write 90-minute screenplays because he gets to the point too quickly. Maybe we should be partners!
I suspect that my writing style comes from my days submitting research findings to basic science journals, where each individual comment must be supported by data or by citation. I’ll try to get to the point more quickly.
In the last post I made two points: 1. Discounts demanded from insurers for front-line services (office visits) create challenges for independent primary care practices that don’t have other sources of revenue, particularly revenue from procedures, and 2. Physicians employed by health systems are less likely to prescribe buprenorphine for treatment of opioid dependence than are small, independent practices.
The result is a shortage of doctors prescribing buprenorphine. This shortage leads to a number of other problems, the most visible (to those who care to notice) being a large number of heroin-related deaths. But other consequences are apparent for those who connect the dots. Wisconsin and other Midwest states contain large, predominately-rural areas where buprenorphine and Suboxone are only available as illicit substances. People addicted to opioids choose ‘self-treatment’ with Suboxone, purchased from the same person who deals heroin. The high cost of buprenorphine and Suboxone encourages people to take very small pieces Suboxone tablets or film; just enough to prevent withdrawal. But the unique pharmacodynamics of buprenorphine that block opioid cravings (the basis for buprenorphine’s efficacy) rely on taking a dosage high enough to maintain blood levels of buprenorphine above the medication’s ‘ceiling effect.’
In other words, small fragments of Suboxone or buprenorphine, taken sublingually, yield the same subjective experience as opioid agonists taken orally.
But this is the tip of a very large iceberg. In areas where buprenorphine/Suboxone is only available illicitly, the scarcity and cost of the medication leads heroin users to take other steps to reduce the costs of ‘self-treatment’. Remember that with sublingual dosing only a third of the buprenorphine enters the systemic bloodstream. Even less reaches the circulation if the drug is swallowed. But 100% reaches the circulation when heroin addicts use the Suboxone or buprenorphine the way they use heroin—by needle. The opioid blocker naloxone is added to create Suboxone, but my new patients have reported injecting Suboxone and buprenorphine, and finding no significant difference between the two.
The people who studied in HS Biology realize that the portal vein does not drain the end of the intestinal tract—meaning that drugs or substances entering ‘backwards’ are not subject to ‘first pass effect’ that destroys oral buprenorphine. This leads to another way to reduce the cost of ‘self-treatment’, referred to as ‘plugging.’ And there’s really nothing more that I want to say about that. Gross.
No matter how clean the marketing, a medication that is injected, ‘plugged’, or sold by heroin dealers will eventually get a black eye. I’ve written about guilt by association, and how patients doing everything right to end an addiction started by their pain doctor feel denigrated for taking Suboxone or buprenorphine exactly as prescribed. We’ve heard about part of Eastern Europe where the black eye to buprenorphine treatment led to political blindness, resulting in the replacement of ‘dreaded buprenorphine’ by a yellow chemical nicknamed ‘Krokodil’. Right now, the primary problem in my region is the potential blurring of lines between treatment and ‘self-treatment’, which is just another form of opioid dependence. I recently began treating a young woman who had been taking illicit Suboxone/buprenorphine, each day, for over 4 years, without any use of opioid agonists. She probably would not be driving a couple hours to see me for each appointment, had the withdrawal symptoms of her newborn not prompted the investigation by social services.
To the person who reviewed my last post— my lack of terseness is showing. I intended to conclude this post today, but when we look more closely, the unintended consequences go on and on. To summarize so far: That the shortage of buprenorphine-certified providers makes buprenorphine/Suboxone a scarce commodity. Buprenorphine has unique effects when taken properly, and the elimination of the obsession to use opioids is a Godsend for many people that cannot be obtained from ANY other substance. While some politicians and regulators see a world where too many doctors put Suboxone and buprenorphine on the streets, the unintended consequence of having too FEW providers has been to fuel the misuse and diversion of a potentially life-saving medication.
In part one, I promised a bit of drama over the Affordable Care Act. I’m getting there. But given that this is a holiday weekend, you will have to wait a few days for part 3!
Addendum: I’m adding comments from a member of the LinkedIn discussion board, from Shaun Shelly, Addictions Specialist at Hope House in Cape Town, South Africa. He points out how the blurring lines between abuse and treatment erode confidence in buprenorphine as a treatment strategy:
Great piece, and I look forward to you going “on and on” a bit more! I see the same in the South African setting where we have only one recently started (last week!) trial state funded OMT program. But all our patients know where they can buy scripts from doctors at R50(US$5) a pop. There is no requirement for special buprenorphine training in order to prescribe. Honestly, these doctors are little more than dealers with titles – these are the same guys who are giving long-term repeat scripts for benzos. And the dealers I know also supply bupe.
The real problem is, as you state, that the self-administration is at best sporadic and sub-optimal. This has the effect of many patients saying Bupe doesn’t work, and when we refer them for medically assisted detox they aren’t interested (Bupe is only funded by the state and many medical aids for 7 day detox). Hopefully sanity will prevail and we will get some decent OMT programs in place.
I have the same experience with some injectors – they report a lemon taste in the mouth but little else negative.
Addicted to Suboxone
First Published 7/23/2013
I hear from the anti-buprenorphine people now and then, less than I used to. I also hear from fans of this blog’s early days, when I routinely lost my temper in response to those people. Their general line was that things on heroin weren’t all that bad, but now, on buprenorphine, things are miserable. Starting buprenorphine somehow removed an opportunity to be clean that they used to have, that they would have used if not for buprenorphine.
They somehow miss the obvious—that they could ALWAYS go back to the heroin addiction that worked so well for them. They’ll say they could stop heroin any time they wanted (you know the joke—‘It is so easy to quit that I quit a hundred times!’), but act as if someone is forcing them to take buprenorphine.
If it is so easy to stop heroin, why not go back to heroin and stop?
For the record, I don’t advise people on buprenorphine to change to heroin. It is difficult to wean off any opioid, including buprenorphine. But I do have patients who have tapered off buprenorphine; something I’ve never witnessed with agonists like oxycodone or heroin (i.e. tapering outside of a controlled environment). Most people who read my blog know that I don’t recommend tapering off buprenorphine for most people, an opinion I’ve come to after seeing many people relapse, and some people die, after stopping buprenorphine.
I received a typical anti-bupe message yesterday; the message and my response are below. There are a few typos that I can’t decipher….
Errors of logic, anyone?
Subutex was the worst mistake I ever made. I was an off and on heroin user for 5 years. I was clean for over a year and relapsed that when I survived Subutex first I was getting it off the streets then my wife ego had the insurance got a script. She was pregnant so the doctor prescribed Subutex. She told her that her brain would never be the same from her opiate use and would need Subutex most likely for the rest of her life. We both were quickly using it IV IT killed our sex life. It made me feel like a woman or something I have no libido at all. I quit using it IV for 9 months then started again which caused me to have a full blown relapse I’m in 12 step recovery. I lost our home shortly after our new born son was born forcing her to move in with her parents and I moved into an sober living house. We are now both trying to taper off this drug that it’s overly prescribed. The doctor put her on 26mg a day mind you we shared but the doctor doesn’t know that. I do believe in short term low dose setting this drug has a therapeutic value. But I believe it’s been designed to get money lost to drug dealers into the pockets of our government. I kicked Heroin and Oxycontin more then once. Getting off Subutex has been the toughest one yet the physical and mental withdraws are horrible. The best bet for addiction treatment is 12 step meetings. All Subutex or Suboxone does is give you a crutch and prolongs actual recovery from the disease of addiction. They don’t tell you about all the terrible side effects behind this medication its marketed as a miracle drug. A wise man once said if it sounds too good to be true then it’s probably not. Rant done hopefully this helps someone. The answer to recovery is the 12 and staying sober 1 day at a time, most important a relationship with a higher power.
My Response:
An interesting comment… You’ve taken heroin for over five years as an ‘off and on user’. You then illegally obtained buprenorphine, and injected it (!)… illegally shared what a physician prescribed for your wife… but it’s all buprenorphine’s fault that you are experiencing problems? Part of the 12 steps that you favor includes taking responsibility for what happens in one’s life, yet I don’t hear a lot of that in your narrative.
I don’t know about ‘miracle drug’, although it probably has saved the lives of both you and your wife, since IV heroin addicts don’t tend to do well beyond 5 years. There is nothing in your history to suggest that your ‘on and off use of heroin’ would have somehow come to an end, had you not changed your drug of choice to buprenorphine. But one aspect of buprenorphine is the ‘ceiling effect’, which makes overdose much less likely.
Likewise, I don’t see a government conspiracy, and I disagree with your comment about ‘low dose use’. Buprenorphine HAS been used in low dosage for treating pain for the past 30 years, but everything about buprenorphine that makes it a good addiction treatment relies on the person taking a dose that assures a high blood level, i.e. above the ceiling level for the drug’s effects. In low doses, buprenorphine acts like any other agonist– i.e. causes the same up/down mood, cravings, and obsessive use pattern.
Your problem is that you became addicted to opioids, and your opioid addiction has cost you a great deal. You misused buprenorphine by injecting it, but luckily for you the drug has certain safety features that helped keep you from overdosing– something heroin doesn’t have. But now you blame buprenorphine for all your problems.
I certainly do not suggest that you do this, but for the sake of making a point—- you could easily go right back to where you were, before you met buprenorphine, if you returned to your addiction to IV heroin. If you started heroin tomorrow, the buprenorphine would be out of your system in a week or so, and… voila….. you would be ‘cured’ from this horrible affliction that you claim to have, i.e. an addiction to buprenorphine. Or are you going to suggest that taking sublingual buprenorphine was somehow WORSE for you than doing what you were doing before finding a doctor, when you were injecting foul solutions of heroin into your veins?! You were FINE with the heroin, but BUPRENORPHINE has ruined your life?
Sorry– I don’t buy it. Most people who stop ANY opioid– buprenorphine, oxycodone, or heroin— end up using again. Buprenorphine, as a partial agonist, relieves cravings in a way that opioid agonists can’t. And taking buprenorphine certainly doesn’t make anything ‘worse’; a person addicted to heroin, who doesn’t like taking buprenorphine, can always go back to heroin! I don’t recommend it, as the overdose risk is very high with heroin, and people on heroin suffer from constant obsessions to take more and more– a life far worse than the person properly taking buprenorphine.
This is where I come in… THESE are the patients I see on a regular basis. The doctors who used to call them ‘good patients’ now call the same people ‘drug addicts.’ And the pain doctors—the ones who create so many addicts—give lectures on ‘how to prescribe opioids.’ I can spare you the need to attend the lecture— the main message is that after you make the patient an addict, you must do everything that you can to separate yourself from the patient before the consequences of that addiction become apparent—so that your hands appear sparkly-clean!
An Addict's Story
I received the following email last week. I considered trimming it down, but the story is well-written and describes a history that is similar to that of many of my patients. As usual, I will write a follow-up post in a week or so.
Dear Dr. J,
I have read many of your posts over the past few years. Like many, I started out disagreeing with your comments and insight, while blaming my inability to manage my addiction on the Suboxone treatment. My active addiction to opiate pain medications was brief, about 4 months of hydrocodone/oxycodone use in the end of 2007. In early, 2008), I reached out to my primary care physician who directed me to an inpatient stabilization followed by Suboxone maintenance/addiction therapy. When I entered treatment I maintained the belief that I was not an addict, and my doctor initially supported this attitude. He described my situation as physical dependence stemming from treatment of pain. I was a recent college graduate, I had a wonderful upbringing, a bright future…I believed that “people like me don’t become drug addicts.” So of course I wanted to minimize the seriousness of my illness. I convinced myself that this physical dependence “happened to me,” and I was doing what needed to be done to resolve the issue. So I saw my doctor monthly and went to weekly addiction therapy sessions. I did not use “street drugs,” or any other RX meds, so my UAs were always clear, and eventually I was seeing the doctor for a refill every few months.
At the same time, I was dealing with the onset of some anxiety and panic issues, which I also used to rationalize my initial abuse of the opiates. As college came to an end I began to get very anxious about the future and panic in certain situations. When I was prescribed the Vicodin and Percocet for a knee injury, it was like finding the key that turned off all these negative feelings/physical sensations. My beliefs regarding success and failure fueled my anxiety, and allowed me to rationalize abusing the opiates as self-medication. When I began taking the pain medications I had no understanding of addiction or opioid dependence, and I honestly thought “this is an RX medication, I am prescribed it for pain, it also helps with this anxiety issue, so taking a few extra is fine.” So, as I said, it was very easy to go along with this idea that I was somehow different than all the other addicts.(“terminal uniqueness,” one of my NA friends taught me that term, I have always loved it.)
My starting dose of Suboxone was 16mgs/daily. Between January and August 2008, I tapered down to about 1 mg/daily. However, in July I experienced a major panic attack and was prescribed clonazepam for my anxiety/panic. In August, I discontinued my Suboxone and was prescribed Bentyl, Tigan, and Clonidine for acute WD symptoms. The withdrawal was really not bad. It lasted about a week; the worst of it was my anxiety, stomach, and exhaustion, which continued beyond the week. I tried to push on through it, however, it was as though I had traveled back in time to the day I had gone into treatment.
The reality was that I had done nothing during those 8 months to understand or manage my addiction or anxiety (beyond medication). At the time, of course, I didn’t understand this– and was immediately looking to place blame with the Suboxone. “Why the hell did I take the drug if I was going to end out feeling the way I did right when I started…I wasted 8 months delaying this inevitable hell”…the usual retorts from an addict in denial. I tried a number of different SSRIs/SNRIs, as well as amphetamines, to help with my exhaustion and focus. Nothing helped; I lost 35 lbs. by late November 2008.
From the very first follow up after stopping the Suboxone, my doctor suggested starting again. I had never relapsed during my treatment with Suboxone, and I had not used since stopping, so starting Suboxone did not make sense to me at the time. However, I knew that it would make my discomfort go away, and decided to start the Suboxone again in early December 2008. We determined that my decrease from 8 mg to 1 mg over two weeks prior to discontinuing was too fast. I still wasn’t willing to deal with the reality of my anxiety and addiction, and continued to minimize.
I went back on the Suboxone. Over the next year, I stayed on the Suboxone consistently, and just focused on living life. I did not do any NA/AA, addiction therapy, etc. In early 2010, I began relapsing. I would run out of my prescription early and substitute with other pain medication. Still rationalizing that the Suboxone was a pain, and I was just doing what was needed to make it work. It was during this period that my addiction became fully active, and the use became less about self-medicating and more about the feeling/escape.
In late 2010, I checked into a treatment center to detox from all opioid medications. Again, the immediate WD symptoms were very mild and the isolation of the center helped with my anxiety. I was able to isolate and almost hide from the anxiety by being in the center and cut off from the world. I left the center 4 days later, prescribed Gabapentin and clonazepam for anxiety. The day I left, I relapsed on the ride home from the center.
It is amazing, but it still had not clicked for me. The anxiety was in the forefront, and I still thought that the addiction was a symptom or result of those issues. Needless to say, I ended up sleeping all day, exhausted, depressed, with the same stomach issues. I was finishing up business school, and trudging through. I would rationalize taking the pain medications again on days when I had school. And I walked down the same road again. The entire time I cursed Suboxone as the cause of all my issues. “If only I would have gone cold turkey from the pain killers back in 2008….I wasn’t an addict until I was prescribed Suboxone”…again the usual BS.
As you can probably guess I hit the wall again, and ended out back in treatment. However, this time something clicked in me, and I was fortunate to have a team of caretakers who could see through my BS. I realized that I had crossed so many lines that I thought I never would, and could not control myself. Instead of just doing a short-term stabilization, I spent 3 weeks in intensive out-patient treatment following my inpatient stay. I was stabilized back on Suboxone, and then for 3 weeks, 8 hours a day, I was focused on my addiction, and the team at the center was not letting me [email protected]@ anything. I started that program in mid June 2011. I learned about my addiction, and got honest with myself, my family, and my friends (I had hidden my addiction and treatment from everyone in my life except for my mother and father up until last summer).
I was humbled in a major way, and finally got real with myself. I had always thought that saying “I have an addiction” was a cop out. Coming to terms with my lack of control was and continues to be very hard. I feel a great deal of guilt and disappointment towards myself. And there is part of me that still wants to believe that I can control all of this and with enough will-power fix all my issues. Ironically, in a way, I am striving to maintain control and fix these issues every day, as I stay clean and focused on my sobriety. I was always afraid of being defined by my addiction. However, when I got honest, I realized that the more I tried to ignore reality, the more my addiction consumed my life.
Ultimately, I wanted to write this email as a thank you to you and share my story with those who visit your site. It took me 5 years, 3 times off and back on Suboxone, and 2 stays in treatment to realize that I am an addict. In hindsight, I think much of my downfall was classic addict behavior; placing blame, terminal uniqueness, etc. I expected Suboxone to resolve all my issues, without doing any actual work.
Looking back on all of my experiences, I thought this is where I would end out. However, working through my addiction has helped my anxiety immensely. And I am beginning to feel it is time to appropriately taper and discontinue my Suboxone. With all the support I have now, and the skills I have gained I feel very optimistic (cautiously).
Dr. Junig – I would be interested in your advice regarding tapering or insight on my story in general.
Thank you to the writer; I’ll be adding my thoughts soon!
Short-Timers
Another question from a reader:
The current blog brings up the notion of long term use of Bupe or short term detox. You say you are a fan of long term use, and that is clearly a good thing when the patient is one headed back to a drug culture of life of crime or is obsessed with the drug. But- what about patients like me and I think many others who have zero contact with the drug world, have never taken an illegal drug, and yet have taken Ocy C over the years for pain and find it all but impossible to stop the Ocy C.
The Suboxone helps with the W/D and just getting through with that is all we want. NA meetings and the like are like being on Mars, it makes no sense. There are no drug cravings at all and the goal is just normal. Or rather, the goal is to make it through the W/D which is so harsh with Oxy C as to be dangerous for older people, whose only source of drugs indeed is the doctors Rx for them And now that too is unavailable. This group does not need Suboxone to become a new problem for them. They just want the help. It is not critically important to determine “who” is being treated. The certification training materials seem to brush over this so lightly that there is only one induction method allowed. One that a drug company would love, but not always a patient — pleading, do no harm.
My Thoughts:
I hear you, and watch for those patients. Frankly I wish I had more of them, so that I could get some movement through my practice—- instead of being stuck with 100 chronic patients and a long wait list. The financial motivation for the DOCTOR is to push people through, for that same reason. Of course the drug company gets paid in either case.
The first question is whether buprenorphine even helps in the case you describe. It is easier, in many ways, to taper with methadone than with buprenorphine, as you don’t have to divide such tiny pills. It has been suggested that it is easier to taper off a partial agonist than an agonist—and I believe that to be true, simply because I have seen people do the former and not the latter. But I don’t know HOW much easier it is—or if psychological aspects of the taper were more responsible than the person’s state of misery.
There were several studies a few years ago that showed relapse rates of 100% in people treated with Suboxone for less than a year; those findings, it seems to me, put a damper on the idea that buprenorphine could be useful for short-term detox. But I don’t know where those people would have fallen on the spectrum that you are presenting. I do know that they were people with a primary diagnosis of ADDICTION— NOT chronic pain– so maybe they are not relevant here.
My caveat would be that I HAVE met many people over the years who are convinced that they fall in the pain camp you describe, but who turn out to be just as ‘addicted’ as anyone else. They describe the process in different terms; instead of admitting to ‘relapsing on opioids’, they describe ‘deciding the pain was worse than they expected, and that it was a mistake to go off opioids.’ They will claim to be different…. But an objective observer would see the same growing attachment to opioids, the same gradual dose escalation, the same excitement and activity when opioids are ‘on board’, and the same depression and misery if a day passes without using.
I agree with your thoughts, and get your point. I just don’t know if very many people are as clearly-defined as you describe. One reason is because there are few conditions that cause pain severe enough to require high-dose opioid agonists for an extended period of time– say, a few months– that then go away. Most pain conditions have residual symptoms—- from chronic inflammation, or even from the set-up of central pain circuits. In a sense the pain is remembered, even after the original injury is repaired. The severity of that residual pain is affected by the person’s emotional state, dependency, motivation, genetics….. and the residual pain becomes a expressway back to using opioids— an expressway that is used often by many people.
Thanks for your comments!
Jerk Counselor
Every now and then I hear about a therapist or addiction doc who is doing such a disservice to the practice of addiction medicine as to deserve special mention. This week’s award goes to a certain counselor at a treatment program in Oshkosh, WI, who I’ll refer to as ‘This Jerk.’
I’ve made no secret, over the years, about my hope for addiction to eventually be treated with the same respect for patients and attention to medical principles as for any other illness. I certainly try my best to work according to those ideas, and find that doing so really helps when it comes to making treatment-based decisions. In other words, I’ll ask myself—if this person had diabetes, what would an endocrinologist do? Or better yet—if I had diabetes, what would I want MY endocrinologist to do?
We all know that certain professions attract certain types of people. Some of us have been pulled over by the cop who was the kid subject to playground taunts, now all grown up, determined to make life a living Hell for anyone with a loose seat-belt. When I worked in the state prison system, I worked with guards who belonged in the same category; men and women who loved to carry keys to cages that held real people. It’s the power trip, I suppose.
This Jerk apparently loves the power trip of ‘treating’ people who are sent back to jail for ‘failing’ his treatment. He doesn’t have to worry about being a lousy therapist; he has a captive audience, and likes it that way. One difficult aspect of being a therapist is treating patients who don’t like us for one reason or another, or who don’t kneel every time we enter the room. But when This Jerk feels disrespected, he picks up the telephone and calls the patient’s PO to report ‘noncompliance with treatment’– then gloats about sending the patient to jail.
Treatment professionals who are in a position of unusual power over a patient must be particularly careful to empathize with their patient’s position. In medical school, we were placed on gurneys and wheeled around by fellow students, to emphasize the vantage of patients coming to the emergency room. We were taught to sit at the same or lower eye-level of our patients, as speaking down to people creates an unsettling power differential.
The power to prescribe or withhold buprenorphine (let alone the power to send to prison!) comes with an obligation not to abuse that power. Withholding buprenorphine causes patients to go into withdrawal—something dreadful to people addicted to opioids. Worse, withholding buprenorphine places patients at very high risk of relapse—which in turn places them directly in harm’s way from overdose and legal repercussions.
This Jerk, I’ve been told, takes issue with psychiatrists who continue to treat patients on buprenorphine who struggle with sobriety. He considers it ‘good care’ to withhold buprenorphine from an addict who uses, supposedly to punish the patient into sobriety.
In case This Jerk (or a similar ethically-challenged counselor) is reading, I’ll point out the obvious: when a doctor pulls the rug from under a patient by withholding medication, that patient might easily join the ranks of other dead addicts. On the other hand, when I work with a patient who is struggling with sobriety, keeping the person on buprenorphine and working to identify triggers for using, that person almost always ‘gets it,’ eventually.
I’ve been working with people addicted to opioids, using this approach, for so long that the other approach—the punitive, ‘cut ‘em loose for struggling’ approach—seems barbaric. I don’t understand how people identified as healthcare workers (nothing professional in his behavior!) rationalize the dismissive approach. I suppose, if This Jerk views addicts as the scum of the Earth, or as people with weak characters, or people who lack ‘will power,’ punishing relapse by withholding treatment feels about right. But most of us leave that world behind when we commit to helping people suffering from illness.
What’s This Jerk’s excuse? Is it that he just doesn’t get it? Or are there other motives at play? With the current cap on patients on buprenorphine, the most lucrative way to practice is to keep turnover high, rewarding practices that hire therapist-idiots like This Jerk.
Or is it the power trip– that people with difficult addictions are an affront to therapists? I’ve met therapists with this attitude before, who seem to have a form of codependency with their patients. They take credit for any success by their patients, but think the patients who fail are not worth their time, and should be dumped, expunged, or kicked-out to relapse and die. I suppose This Jerk would say ‘not my problem! I did MY job!’
Readers may suspect that this topic irritates me—and they’re right. Maybe I’ve seen more death, up close, than the typical counselor. I’ve attended autopsies; I’ve reviewed post-mortem photos from overdose scenes; I’ve pushed IV fluids into people with fatal injuries who presented for emergency surgery. I have spent hours with the parents of young patients who died from overdose. I’ve seen the parents’ faces as they struggled with the thought that they could, or should, have done something else—just one more thing to save their child. Death, to me, is not ‘theoretical.’ It is not something to toy with, and certainly not something to invite into the life of a person who made me angry, for not recovering at MY pace.
I suspect that the Jerks of the world will continue to justify their sadistic approach to ‘treatment.’ But patients—at least SOME patients—don’t have to put up with that behavior. People like This Jerk hold power over an individual with an addiction history, but there is power in numbers. It is not appropriate to use one’s power vindictively, or to gloat over a patient’s struggle. It is not appropriate to humiliate a patient in front of others. If you see that behavior, collect witnesses, and bring it to someone’s attention. Maybe that ‘someone’ will write a blog post about it!
Doctors in particular should treat patients with ALL diseases—including addiction—with respect. It is not respectful, or ethical, to deprive a patient of life-sustaining medication—especially out of spite. I look forward to the day when the thought of ‘kicking someone off Suboxone’ is viewed as similar to kicking a poorly-compliant teenage diabetic off insulin.
Would THAT make sense— even to This Jerk?
Making People Stop
Below is an e-mail that I changed just enough to hide the person’s identity. Every week, I receive messages that describe similar situations.
My husband has struggled GREATLY with substance abuse since in his 20’s; he is now in his mid-40’s. He is the kindest sweetest man and he is the BEST husband and father. When he is using he becomes someone he is not. We have run the gamut from jail to overdose. Six years ago a friend introduced him to Suboxone and it LITERALLY gave him his life back. He bought it off the friend for years, where it was very expensive. Finally I brought him to a doctor a bit over a year ago. She is pretty adamant about weaning him off of Suboxone.
From experience, I know that 2-3 months after he stops Suboxone he will relapse. I strongly believe it IS a MIRACLE drug! I agree in the sense that if a diabetic needs insulin to save his life, you give it for a lifetime. My husband over the last 6 years has been the man of my dreams, the man I always knew he was. I have extreme anxiety because I know this doctor is just doing her job and trying to follow guidelines however my husband’s LIFE is at stake! It’s not like if he stops this med he could ‘just’ have depression; he could end up in jail, or worse. He has his life back. He is enjoying his family life as he should.
If this is what it takes for him to live a normal life then why not? When we ask his doctor about staying on Suboxone, she says her concern is that we don’t know the long-term effects. She doesn’t want to keep anyone on any med without knowing what it could do. She says it hasn’t been on the market long enough.
My husband had a SEVERE opioid addiction. He was taking 10-15 Oxycontin 80mgs a day and then ended up switching to 400mgs of methadone before he switched to Suboxone. He has found that he is comfortable with 4 of the 8mg pills per day. I believe it is because he was used to taking such high doses of opioids. He has tried really hard to decrease Suboxone for his doctor but I see the anxiety build in him. She says no one in her practice is on that dose. To be honest he was taking more when he was buying them from a friend but brought himself to a stable 4 pills per day when he started with the doctor. He and I both REALLY like her and would like to continue treatment with her. I wish I had a DVD of little clips of our life from before and after Suboxone. I am positive she would be floored. I am positive she would understand my concern. In my eyes my husband is back. He is such a beautiful soul and I hate to see that taken away from him yet again.
Doctor I read up at the top of this blog that you agree with a lifetime use. He currently has no noted side effects. Do you have any suggestions that I may present to his doctor? I dream of the day that she says it is alright for him to continue on this until maybe he chooses to wean if he so chooses to do so. That would alleviate SO MUCH stress on both of us. Please let me know what you think.
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I agree with most of the opinions expressed in the email. I know how horrible things are for active opioid addicts—and for the families of active opioid addicts.
More and more physicians pay lip service to ‘addiction as a disease,’ but most do not yet treat addiction as a disease. The comments about diabetes are ‘right on.’ One could substitute a number of diseases to demonstrate the same point. We physicians have few illnesses that we cure; rather we manage illness over a person’s lifetime— and opioid dependence is clearly a life-long illness.
To address a couple points in the message: the active ingredient in Suboxone, buprenorphine, has been in clinical use for over three decades, and has established a clean safety profile. Buprenorphine has not been used at the high doses employed for treating opioid dependence for quite as long, but even that track record is significant, i.e. 8 years in this country, and longer in Europe. Most physicians would not consider an 8-yr-old medication to be a ‘new drug!’
The situation described in the message is, in my opinion, the result of several factors. First and foremost, the reluctance to prescribe buprenorphine is a consequence of stigma. Doctors prescribe new antidepressants, pain relievers, blood pressure treatments, and cholesterol-lowering agents with much less concern over ‘safety.’ I wonder, frankly, if safety is the concern—or whether there is an unconscious sense that patients addicted to opioids, or to other substances, don’t deserve an ‘easy way out’ of their problem; that sitting through a miserable detox is a more fitting ‘treatment’ than a pill that makes things better.
I come to this cynical conclusion only because the alternative—that buprenorphine is ‘dangerous’—doesn’t make sense. The risk of any medication must be compared against the risk of not using that medication. As the message states, we know the risk of ‘not treating’ the woman’s husband! Similar comparisons are used to justify the use of chemotherapeutic agents that have severe toxic effects, including the risk of killing the patient. As I’ve written in prior posts, the fatality rate from untreated opioid dependence is as high as for many cancers. So does it make any sense to withhold buprenorphine out of safety concerns?!
There are other reasons for doctors’ reluctance to prescribe buprenorphine. Many fear they will do something wrong, and run afoul of the DEA during an audit—a process that all buprenorphine-certified prescribers are subject to. Some doctors feel pressure from friends and family members of patients, who often blame the doctor for keeping the patient ‘stuck on Suboxone.’ Some doctors want to maintain high patient turnover in order to keep money coming in, since practices are ‘capped’ at 100 patients per certified physician.
Finally, I think many doctors see ongoing treatment as less satisfying than a ‘cure.’ They consider residential treatment the gold standard, and buprenorphine as a less-intensive alternative. They buy into the idea that the addict can be returned to ‘normal’—whatever that is—if he/she works at recovery hard enough. I understand the thought, as that is the type of treatment experience that I went through. But on the other hand, the relapse rate for opioid dependence, after residential treatment, is very high. I myself relapsed after seven years of recovery, losing my career, and almost my life. During my years as medical director of a large residential treatment center, patients discharged as ‘successfully treated’ often became repeat customers, at least until they lost their job and health insurance. Some of them– too many of them–died.
I won’t get into the specifics of treatment; I’ll leave that to her husband’s doctor to work out. But I do hope that the doctor will give some thought to whether stopping this life-saving treatment is truly in the patient’s best interest.
To the patient’s wife– I encourage you to continue as an advocate, and I hope your doctor will understand your perspective.
Relapse in an Era of Buprenorphine
A recent experience with a patient helped me realize some of the dramatic differences in the treatment of opioid dependence, in an era of buprenorphine.
I drug-test patients who are treated with buprenorphine or Suboxone. The point of testing is not to catch someone messing up, but rather to determine when a person is in trouble. It would be great if we could simply rely on the word of our patients, but once a person is using opioids, his/her own ability to know what is true falls apart. All of us who treat addiction have heard patients rationalize relapse as something they ‘had to do’ for one reason or another, for example. The effects of active using on insight are why I like the use of ‘DENIAL’ as a mnemonic for ‘Don’t Even Notice I Am Lying.’
The effects of relapse on telling the truth are part of the profound impact of using on a person’s insight. Insight disappears very quickly during active using, as the mind abandons the broad view and becomes focused on one goal. Before buprenorphine, drug testing was in some ways more, and other ways less important. It was more important because after relapse, the person was immediately thrown back into the world of desperate scrambling, where risks for consequences are high. On the other hand, testing was less important—or maybe necessary– because experienced addictionologists (and spouses) could see the effects of using, including the loss of insight, in the active addict’s eyes.
I was one of those people who experienced that rapid loss of insight after my relapse, back in 2000. For years I had attended AA and NA; hundreds if not thousands of meetings over seven years. I remember comforting myself that ‘if I ever get off track, at least I now know where the door is to get back.’ I didn’t realize that at the instant one relapses, that door becomes nowhere to be found.
In retrospect, I don’t know if the door actually disappeared. I suspect that with the right attitude, that same door would have opened for me. But the honesty and humility that I needed, in order to ask for help in finding and passing through the door, were suddenly replaced by the need for secrets—secrets about everything. As soon as I relapsed, nobody could be trusted. Nobody would understand me. I was on my own.
Contrast that with the experiences of patients on buprenorphine who relapse with opioid agonists. As I compare their experiences to mine, I realize that I am using the experiences of a couple people to make broad generalizations. But I have seen a number of examples that support these generalizations, that have consistently followed the paths that I’m about to describe.
One patient—call him ‘Paul’—told me about his relapse before I even mentioned that I would be asking for a urine test. In fact, he was eager to tell me about his experience, as if he looked forward to getting it off his conscience. “I have to tell you that I really screwed up last week,” he said. When I asked him what happened, he said that a friend who he hadn’t seen for several months came through town and stopped by his house. With little warning, his friend pulled out a bag of heroin and a couple clean needles, tossed them on the table, and said ‘let’s fire up.’
After shooting the heroin, Paul immediately felt disappointed in himself. Unlike in the old days, he felt nothing from the heroin. While his old friend nodded off next to him, Paul wondered what the heck happened—and immediately wanted to talk to me about the situation.
His desire to talk is an amazing thing—and worth noting. Without buprenorphine, a person who relapses is not generally eager to speak to his/her sponsor, let alone counselor or physician. In those cases, the mind reels from an avalanche of shame, and the need to keep secrets—even from one’s own awareness—becomes paramount.
There are many buprenorphine programs that would discharge a person for one relapse—and in such cases, I would not expect the same type of honesty from patients. I don’t get the logic of those programs, and I become angry when I think about them. As I’ve said before, if a person relapses, that person NEEDS help—not abandonment! I believe that the proper approach to treating addiction can be found in almost all cases simply by considering opioid dependence to be another chronic illness. And if someone with heart disease overexerts himself and comes in with chest pain, we don’t boot him from treatment!
Paul made an appointment to talk about his experience. He explained how he felt when his old buddy contacted him, and we discussed ways to avoid meeting up with ‘old friends’ in the future. He discussed the urge to escape when he saw the paraphernalia—to escape from life’s responsibilities—and we talked about how difficult it can be to simply tolerate life sometimes, and the powerful effects of triggers and cues. Most interesting to me, as a psychodynamic psychiatrist, he talked about a complicated set of thoughts and feelings that came up when he saw the drugs—questions about who he was, about shame, about the heavy load that comes with doing the right thing, and about the pressure of not letting people down. Those are all big issues, I said as I agreed with him. How much easier, at least for a few moments, to just be ‘nothing’—to have no expectations about one’s self!
We talked about the challenge of being ‘someone’– of being proud of one’s self. It feels good to do the right thing– but it may also feel bad. Am I letting my old friends down, if I do better? I suggested that he might watch the old movie, Ordinary People, where a younger brother struggles after surviving an accident that claimed the life of his brother.
Before buprenorphine, people struggled with opioid dependence largely on their own. Yes, we had twelve step groups—and still do—but twelve step groups place the responsibility to get one’s act together squarely on the back of the using addict. Many people in AA or NA will say that “AA is a selfish program.” It has to be. When one relapses, one is left with his own distorted insight, accumulating consequences until, hopefully, he finds his way back to the pathway established by the simple program of the steps.
On buprenorphine, relapse doesn’t necessarily cause instant loss of insight. I don’t mean to minimize relapse, as bad things can always happen. For example, I have had patients stuck in a pattern of chronic relapse that was difficult to straighten out, even though there was little or no psychic effect from the drug being abused. But from an optimistic standpoint, relapse on buprenorphine stimulates a deeper investigation into what is missing from the person’s life, and a renewed effort to gain what is missing.
This assumes, of course, that the person is not simply tossed from treatment for the relapse. In that case, other people are left trying to figure out what happened—when the obituary appears a few months later.
Consequences Section
Weeks ago I posted a few new ideas—things like a memorial wall for victims of opioid dependence, and a ‘wall of shame’ for doctors who are known for reckless prescribing of opioids. I mentioned these ideas over at SuboxForum as well.
I received good feedback from readers here, and from members there. Sometimes the best feedback is the hardest to hear; I’ll get excited about a certain plan of action, and like anyone, I don’t like it when someone rains on my parade.
One of my addiction docs from years ago was big on ‘sober thinking.’ Back then, it seemed as if anything I came up with that pushed the boundaries was in need of more ‘sober thinking.’ I wondered if ‘sober thinking’ was simply code for ‘I don’t want to say yes to your idea, and maybe that was the case in SOME instances. But I now recognize a part of myself that acts quickly, impulsively, with great optimism, and with little regard for risks. ‘Sober thinking’ is simply letting an idea sit in one’s mind for a few days or even weeks, and keeping a truly open mind to the comments that one receives about the idea.
I won’t spell out who wrote to me, but I’ll thank the people who did—who risked my ire by giving their honest opinions. I mentioned a memorial page; some people pointed out that a memorial on an addiction-related web page may add to the pain and shame felt by family members. As for my ‘doctor wall of shame’, I was reminded that every story has two sides, and it may be more useful to simply provide referenced information that would allow readers to make up their minds without my own coloring of the facts. I want to thank the people who wrote, and let them know that they made a difference—and the site will be better because of their efforts.
Instead of the earlier ideas, I added what I am calling the ‘consequences’ page. The page will contain news stories identified to Google as having ‘drug overdose’ in their tags. The information will be replaced every 24 hours or so. I experimented with a couple different intervals and found that no day went by without a significant amount of news under that tag—a rather compelling statistic!
Click on ‘consequences’ to check it out, and let me know what you think!