Suboxone, Buprenorphine, Addiction Treatment Success and Failure

High hopes for buprenorphine, an effective treatment for opioid addiction, have been tempered by a messy reality: health complications and deaths, unscrupulous doctors and a reputation as a street drug. (source infra)

Addiction Treatment With a Dark Side - NYTimes.com: "....Suboxone is the blockbuster drug most people have never heard of. Surpassing well-known medications like Viagra and Adderall, it generated $1.55 billion in United States sales last year, its success fueled by an exploding opioid abuse epidemic and the embrace of federal officials who helped finance its development and promoted it as a safer, less stigmatized alternative to methadone. But more than a decade after Suboxone went on the market, and with the Affordable Care Act poised to bring many more addicts into treatment, the high hopes have been tempered by a messy reality. Buprenorphine has become both medication and dope: a treatment with considerable successes and also failures, as well as a street and prison drug bedeviling local authorities. It has attracted unscrupulous doctors and caused more health complications and deaths than its advocates acknowledge...." (read more at link above)

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