Anyone who proposes an easy solution to the overdose epidemic is either a simpleton or a politician. But far too many people entrusted with the power and responsibility to set priorities decry the number of overdose deaths, then stigmatize and demonize every effort to save lives. “Suboxone can be diverted.” “Someone might drive impaired after methadone.” “Needle exchange programs attract drug dealers.” Meanwhile the number of deaths from overdose make clear that current solutions are not working. Small community newspapers have story after story about the increasing number of deaths, but the silence in Washington is deafening. I picture a cruise ship leaving one after another drowning passenger in it’s wake, while the ship’s captain dines at the captain’s table, pausing between bites to tell dinner guests that all is well.
Statistics and numbers don’t tell a story unless put into context, so some simple comparisons help demonstrate the magnitude of the ‘opioid problem.’ My perception is skewed after sitting with so many people affected by addiction, but we seem to have a huge blind spot for one of the leading killers of young people. Consider the issues our country’s leaders talk about and our news reporters write about. I think we all know the things that get our President’s undies in a bundle… but did I miss the Presidential Summit on Opioid Dependence? This would not be the first time that our leaders missed the elephant in the living room, of course— but it may be one of the first times a President has been given a pass after missing this big an elephant for this long. I’m old enough to remember the media soundly criticizing Reagan for failing to create a sense of urgency over AIDS. And so I wonder… When is Obama going to express urgency about opioids? Where is the media criticism of his lack of urgency? Today he told reporters he ‘will leave everything on the field during his last year in office,’ just before he took off for another Christmas in Hawaii. Will that time on the field include some concern for people killed by overdose?
I don’t get the impression that our President lies awake all night worrying about overdose deaths. But maybe he should. We heard a great deal from Obama about the need to bring troops home from Iraq a few years ago. And all of the networks kept a running tally of US deaths in Iraq in the lower right corner of the screen during the evening news. So let’s compare priorities. Let’s add up all of the deaths of US troops during Iraq II during two administrations of Bush and the 1 and 3/4 Obama administrations. Let’s add the deaths from the World Trade Center attacks, the recent terrorist attacks in France and California, and the mass shootings at Sandy Hook and Columbine. How does that number compare to the impact of opioid dependence?
I don’t intend to lessen the honor of fallen military servicemen and women, or downplay the horror experienced by victims of 911 and other violent attacks. I chose these numbers because the horror of each situation prompted speeches by our leaders, rallies by our citizens, and headlines in National news media. The speeches and commitments of our President and the coverage by news anchors are supposed to be a reflection of what our citizens care about.
The number of deaths from overdose in 2013 alone– one year– was over four times greater than the complete count of US deaths in Iraq, plus all of the horrible events listed above. US deaths in the Iraq war? About 4500. The Trade Center attacks killed almost 3000 people. In 2013, over 30,000 US citizens died from overdose. Surprised? I was. On average about 100 people in the US die from overdose every day– day after day.
As I wrote above, I remember the reporters calling out Reagan over AIDS. Activists claimed that Reagan avoided talking about HIV because of the stigma associated with ‘homosexuals’, the people hit the hardest by the initial outbreak of HIV. They say that the people who died were ‘second class citizens’ who didn’t have a voice, and it was easier for Reagan to pretend that the problem didn’t exist. Many people believe that if Reagan spoke about AIDS in his speeches or directed National attention toward the outbreak of the virus, that fewer people would have died. Maybe those people were right.
If they were, what’s Obama’s excuse?
Tag: opioids
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!
Mean Streak
I guess I do get irritable sometimes… but I’m getting better at controlling my anger as I get older. One cool thing about a blog is that I can go back and see what I wrote years ago. In this case, I was looking for a post about telling the difference between opioid toxicity (from taking too much) versus opioid withdrawal. In that post I suggested looking at the size of the pupils. The name of the post, in case anyone is interested, is called ‘abres los ojos’— the name of an old Penelope Cruz movie and spanish for ‘open your eyes.’
Penelope Cruz sounds very cool, by the way, when she whispers ‘abres los ojos…’ as you can hear at the beginning of the movie trailer. The movie was remade and called ‘Vanilla Sky’– again with Penelope Cruz, but this time with her speaking in English.
Am I the only one who cares about this stuff?!
The post BEFORE that one was from a time– 2009– when people often wrote to tell me how misguided I was for recommeding buprenoprhine. Those comments, at a time when so many young people were dying from overdose, would really get to me. I’ll share the exchange, for old time’s sake. For people who enjoyed my older, feisty posts, they are still out there– you just need to keep hitting the ‘earlier posts’ button!
The post:
This guy doesn’t like Suboxone– or the horse it rode in on. He has been trying to write angry posts under my youtube videos, but I have been blocking them– His feelings about Suboxone popped up on one of the health sites out there this morning, catching my attention through ‘Google alerts’ for Suboxone. It must be the same guy, because the complaints are the same, the language is the same, and in both cases the screen names are related to frogs(!). I will go ahead and post his comments, and then my response, so that he can relax– knowing that he has done his part in the epic struggle over Suboxone.
Ive looked all over the internet and still have not found more then 5 people who have quit suboxone like i have. I took it for 12 months tapered down to 2 mg and quit 5 days ago..Basicly i am writing this due to the fact that i am really pissed at the fraud i feel is being commited by the drug maker of suboxone. I was taking 15 10 mg a day of percocet and 10 mg a day of norco a day b4 i got on sub. Anyways the reason i am so pissed is that these last 5 days have been the worse 5 days ive ever had.My Dr says oh youll just feel little tired for a few days is all.. ya right… 5 days of not being able to move,anxiety,depression you name it.. and no i am not crazy i took pills for shoulder injury so i have an idea where these feelings come from and its the good ole subs that all these Drs are making a fortune off. You must remember that out of all My drs patients i am like the only one whos quit totaly and can actually sit here and tell you what its like.. Its terrible and after considerable thought i think people need to know this sub is just another opiate and what gets me is the withdrawls are even worse then reg opiates. I CLOSE WITH ONE LAST COMMENT: ITS ALL ABOUT THE MONEY WHEN IT COMES TO SUBS: Think twice before some slick talking Dr wants you on it.. its far from a magic pill. Just ask the few of us out of 1000000,0000 people who quit the phoney stuff.
There is no magic pill for addiction to pain pills and if you think sub is then think again..One last thing, try and ****** suboxone withdrawls and guess what youll find??? first 50 sites pop up are paid for by the drug maker of sub and you have to dig to find real facts from patients with experience.. Drug maker pays big bucks to keep all the info ” positive” on subs… They are no dam different then the crooks on wal-street !
My Response:
Before my answer, a quick comment– I do like the ‘crooks on wal-street’ remark; I haven’t seen that ‘play on trademark words’ before. I am assuming that he was making a joke– he had to be, right?
OK, here is my response. As usual it is a bit ‘snotty’– but you have to remember that I get this garbage all the time, and it gets old:
I am sorry to be the one to break this to you, but you are an opiate addict. Moreover, you will always be an opiate addict; hopefully you will be an addict ‘in remission’. The brain pathways that make up ‘addiction’ are laid down in a manner that involves memory processes; becoming a ‘non-addict’ would be like forgetting how to ride a bike. It cannot happen. Again, you can be in remission, but with opiates, that is very difficult– and unfortunately very uncommon.
Many people write about how they used will power or vitamins or some other silly technique to quit opiates– once they have gone over 5 or 10 years, I am interested in listening to them. It is easy to quit using for a year– it is another thing entirely to quit using for 10 years. I got clean in 1993 and felt pretty proud of myself… I quit through AA and NA, not Suboxone. I worked with opiates the whole time, giving patients IV fentanyl, morphine, demerol, etc in the operating room… but in 2000, thanks to a little market in the Bahamas that sold codeine over the counter, I relapsed. I ended up losing almost everything, including my career, all my money, a vacation cottage, my medical license… ****** ‘mens health’ and ‘the junkie in the OR’ and you will read my story.
There is no ‘fraud’, no ‘slick doctors’. There are doctors trying to help, and some work harder than others to keep people on track. We now know that Suboxone is best thought of as a long-term treatment, just like most other illnesses; we treat diabetes, hypertension, asthma, etc with long-term agents; if you stop your blood pressure meds abruptly you will have ‘rebound hypertension’ that can be very dangerous… Suboxone is similar to any other treatment. The thing is, pharmacy companies never used to care about addiction; the money is in treating other illnesses– just watch the commercials on TV! The money has been in viagra-type drugs! Suboxone is the first generation of opiate-dependence medications; the next wave will have fewer side effects, and so on. That is what happens with every disease. I am glad addiction finally has the attention of pharmaceutical companies. As for ‘slick docs’, there are many easier ways to make a buck in medicine! I am at the ‘cap’ of patients; the money I make treating patients with Suboxone is a tiny fraction of what I made as an anesthesiologist; I could drop the Suboxone practice tomorrow and take one of the 30 jobs in my area frantically looking for psychiatrists and make as much or more money. Yes, there probably are some ‘bad docs’ out there– there are ‘bad everythings’. But a bad doc will make a lot more money treating ‘pain’ using oxycodone than treating addiction with Suboxone! For one thing, there is no cap on pain patients! And when a doc wants to prescribe Suboxone, he/she can have only 30– THIRTY– patients for the first year. Hard to get rich on 30 patients!
Suboxone has the opiate activity of about 30 mg of methadone. When tapering off Suboxone, the vast majority of withdrawal symptoms occurs during the final parts of the taper– the last 2 mg. That is because of the ‘ceiling effect’. But you are not just tapering off Suboxone…
Do you remember when you started Suboxone, how lousy you felt, and how Suboxone eliminated the withdrawal? YOU NEVER FINISHED GETTING OFF THE STUFF YOU WERE ADDICTED TO. There is no ‘free lunch’; Suboxone allowed you to avoid all that withdrawal; if you stop Suboxone, you have to finish the work you never finished before– going through the withdrawal that you ‘postponed’ with Suboxone! Welcome to the real world– you likely abused those pills for years, and if you don’t want treatment with Suboxone, you had better start a recovery program, or you will be right back to using again.
Human nature can be a disappointment at times… When I ‘got clean’ after my relapse 8 years ago, I was just grateful to be ‘free’– even for just a few days of freedom! To get to freedom, I was in a locked ward for a week, no shoelaces (so I wouldn’t hang myself!), surrounded by people who were either withdrawing or being held to keep them from self-harm (it was a psych ward/detox ward combined). After that, I was in treatment for over three months– away from my family all that time, and I couldn’t leave the grounds without an ‘escort’ (no, not that kind of ‘escort’!). Treatment started at 6:30 AM and ended at 10 PM. The rare ‘spare time’ was used to do assignments. After those three months I was in group treatment for 6 years, and also AA and NA meetings several times per week. I still practice and active program 8 years later– I know what happens to people who stop: they eventually relapse, and some of them die. I AM NOT EXAGGERATING ‘FOR EFFECT’ HERE.
I had better stop or I will spend all of 2009 with this post… My final comment: Most of what you are feeling is not ‘Suboxone withdrawal’. I have watched many people stop Suboxone; some have bad withdrawal, some have NONE. When you talk about ‘anxiety’ or other problems facing life on life’s terms, you are experiencing life as an untreated addict. ADDICTS WHO SIMPLY STOP TAKING THEIR DRUG OF CHOICE FEEL MISERABLE!!! That is not withdrawal, and it doesn’t go away! Suboxone held things ‘in remission’ and allowed you to pretend you were not an addict; it is NOT a cure. So now, off Suboxone, you will see what it is like to live life as an opiate addict without treatment– and if you don’t get treatment, you will likely relapse. You will relapse because untreated addicts find life intolerable.
My human nature comment– everyone wants good things, but nobody wants to do the work to get them… (I’m in a bit of a mood today I guess– sorry). Recovery from opiates has always taken work– very hard work. And even then, success was rare– most people had to go back to treatment over and over and over before finally getting it. If people stopped working, as I stopped working in 1997, they eventually got sick again. Enter Suboxone: now you can have instant remission from active addiction! So are people grateful for that fact? That now, instead of years and years of struggle, they can take one pill each morning and hold their addiction in check? NO. Now they complain that ‘I don’t feel good when I stop Suboxone!’. Sorry, but a part of me says ‘poor baby’. You have a fatal illness, and you think you are done with it… you will find going forward that you will either use, or you will take buprenorphine or a new medication along the same line, or you will be attending meetings for life. Those are your three choices– pick one.
If you find a 4th choice, tell me about it in 5 years. I would like to hear how you did it, and yes, I hope you do find it (rather than die using). But I looked for that other path myself for years and never found it, and so did millions of other addicts.
Back to the present…
Phew. Makes me tired just remembering those days. Since then the number of deaths have only gone up, but at least there is a better acceptance for treating opioid dependence using effective medications— at least for people ready to accept that help.
Brattleboro Vermont To Addicts: Stay Stoned!
I was stunned to see this story about the town of Brattleboro, a town in Vermont with a name famous for the rats that grew up there.
As an aside, my PhD thesis involved working with vasopressin receptors in the brain, and that is why I’m familiar with Brattleboro rats– a species of rat that spontaneously mutated and lost the ability to make vasopressin.
One would think that inhabitants of a town made famous over a rat would be on their best behavior. But they behaved worse than their namesakes at a meeting intended to get the OK for a clinic to treat people using Suboxone. I’ll let you read the article, while I get back to what I was doing when I stumbled across the article. What a bunch of…
Ah, forget it.
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!