Science Be Damned: Americans Prefer Broken Method Of Heroin Treatment, Survey Finds

In developed countries around the globe, the standard of care for opiate addiction is what's known as "medically assisted treatment." Under a doctor's supervision, people with addictive disorders are prescribed medications like methadone, buprenorphine and Suboxone, which remove the cravings associated with opiate addiction. In the U.S., however, by far the most common form of treatment is based around the concept of strict abstinence. Advocates of the abstinence model consider the use of Suboxone or methadone to be tantamount to using heroin itself. Many in the medical establishment oppose the abstinence model -- as do officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration -- and a recent Huffington Post investigation found that the bias in favor of abstinence is costing the lives of those it regularly fails. Over 90 percent of people treated with the abstinence method will relapse. “If somebody has a heroin dependence and they did not have the possibility to be offered methadone or Suboxone, then I think it’s a fairly tall order to try and get any success,” Dr. Bankole Johnson, professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told The Huffington Post previously. “There have been so many papers on this -- the impact of methadone and Suboxone. It’s not even controversial. It’s just a fact that this is the best way to wean people off an opioid addi...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news