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FDA Approves First Implant Treatment For Opioid Addiction (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Bloomberg: The Food and Drug Administration cleared the first implant in the U.S. to treat heroin and opioid painkiller addictions. The product, Probuphine, may be used to treat addicts continuously for six months with the drug buprenorphine, according to a statement from the agency on Thursday. Titan Pharmaceuticals Inc. and partner Braeburn Pharmaceuticals are the two companies behind the implant and plan to bring it to the market just as Congress passed a bill aimed at addressing the opioid crisis. Buprenorphine differs from methadone in that it doesn't require a treatment program. Doctors can prescribe the implant to patients after they take a four-hour training program. The FDA rejected the implant in 2013 because the original dose that the companies proposed was too low to provide effective treatment. The companies decided to maintain the lower dose and attempt to gain approval by restricting use to patients who already were stable on such amounts. Meanwhile, employers are struggling to find workers who can pass a pre-employment drug test.
So really, this is no different than treating nicotine addiction with more nicotine (ie. gums and patches, etc).
There's a reason we don't treat alcoholics with whiskey.
Actually in some very rare cases you might do exactly that. Sudden alcohol cessation can have fatal consequences, even more dangerous than quitting opiates cold turkey.
The idea is to replace the drug of choice with a drug that will 1) not provide a high, and 2) reduce withdrawal symptoms.
Opiate addicts are a little more functional on replacements than on heroin, but this is only because they don't have to worry about how they're going to "stay well". People can be functional heroin addicts if they don't have to worry about sourcing their next dose. In Chasing the Scream, Johann Hari says that some countries give the give their opiate addicts all the heroin they need, and provide a safe, supervised environment for use. Most addicts eventually age out of their addiction.
I met a real drug addict about a year ago, but I didn't realize it at the time. She fluttered from topic to topic like a butterfly, and I said, to myself, "this woman is high as a kite..." She told me about going to the Methadone clinic every day. She gradually invited me into her world, and I learned that the methadone wasn't enough to fill the "holes in her soul". She supplemented her opiates with the street pharmacy's medicines.
With my influence, by about six months she was doing much better. She quit methadone and alcohol cold-turkey. Then the mental health system got a hold of her, and it's been a real struggle ever since.
Calling the mental health system "Psychiatric torture" is not fair to the suffering endured by people who've actually been tortured, but it precisely describes the hopelessness and futility endured by people who are "treated" with drugs that do not address any of the causes of their condition. "Psychiatric Abuse" will have to suffice.
She got addicted to anxiety medications during her fifth mental hospital stay. She'd only wanted them as-needed, but they forced her to take that pill every day. Two weeks after she was released, she hatched a stupid plan to get through the benzodiazepine withdrawal. We got together the second night of her stupid plan, and had a little fight. She said that I didn't understand that she wasn't going to get addicted again, she just needed it so she could sleep. She said it was barely any heroin at all, and just to spite me, she prepared a second shot and did that too.
When she revived, she was immediately terrified by the sudden presence of people in uniform. The firefighters should've followed protocol and taken her to the hospital, but I'd told them that she was already on court-ordered treatment, so they decided to just disappear into the night. After a few more minutes, the police decided they could leave too. The only evidence I have that anyone was there is the nebulizer used to squirt the anti-opiate drug into her nose.
She did very well for the next two weeks. But I was 2 hours away, and she was left to take care of herself, with the added burden of having to take court-ordered anti-psychotic sedatives. She was back in the mental hospital about 5 weeks after her release from the fifth mental hospital stay.
Psychiatrists must be trained to not care why their patients are in their care. They gave her a new anti-psychotic, but she was still quite delusional when she was released from her sixth mental hospitalization.
By this point I'd obtained the drug that she actually needed. It worked exactly as I thought it would, I brought her to live closer to me, and she started to recover from her anti-psychotic-induced brain trauma. Her new psychiatric nurse initially wanted her to stay on the anti-psychotic sedative, but eventually realized the patient doesn't actually need to be permanently sedated.
But she ran out of anxiety medication recently... Her new court-ordered-treatment provider said they didn't provide those drugs, so my friend went to source them from her old "friends". Street drugs are much easier to source than specific second-hand prescription medications.
Street drugs caused her to become psychotic again. She would have come out o