Suboxone Forum Upgrade
Over the past year I’ve done more work ‘in the trenches’ than on this blog. I’ve been working with other forms of medication-assisted treatment, particularly methadone. In the near future I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned about the options now available for treating opioid use disorder, which will hopefully serve as one resource for guiding people addicted to opioids to the resources that are likeliest to help.
Five years ago, my forum about Suboxone and buprenorphine was receiving about five times the traffic as now. I wonder – is that because I haven’t aggressi...
Source: Suboxone Talk Zone - October 9, 2019 Category: Addiction Authors: admin Tags: Buprenorphine Suboxone Forum medication assisted treatment opioid addiction Source Type: blogs
Part 4 - Everything We Were Taught About High Doses Was Wrong, and the Same Hand-Crafted Graph
by Drew Rosielle (@drosielle)A Series of Observations on Opioids By a Palliative Doc Who Prescribes A Lot of Opioids But Also Has Questions.This is the 4th post in a series about opioids, with a focus on how my thinking about opioids has changed over the years. See also:Part 1 – Introduction, General Disclaimers, Hand-Wringing, and a Hand-Crafted Graph.Part 2 – We Were Wrong 20 years Ago, Our Current Response to the Opioid Crisis is Wrong, But We Should Still Be Helping Most of our Long-Term Patients Reduce Their Opioid DosesPart 3 – Opioids Have Ceiling Effects, High-Doses are Rarely Therapeutic, and Another Hand-Cr...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - October 5, 2019 Category: Palliative Care Tags: opioids pain rosielle The profession Source Type: blogs
Part 3 - Opioids Have Ceiling Effects, High-Doses are Rarely Therapeutic, and Another Hand-Crafted Graph
by Drew Rosielle (@drosielle)A Series of Observations on Opioids By a Palliative Doc Who Prescribes A Lot of Opioids But Also Has Questions.This is the 3rd post in a series about opioid, with a focus on how my thinking about opioids has changed over the years. See also:Part 1 – Introduction, General Disclaimers, Hand-Wringing, and a Hand-Crafted Graph.Part 2 – We Were Wrong 20 years Ago, Our Current Response to the Opioid Crisis is Wrong, But We Should Still Be Helping Most of our Long-Term Patients Reduce Their Opioid DosesThis is Part 3 – Opioids Have Ceiling Effects, High-Doses are Rarely Therapeutic, and Another ...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - October 4, 2019 Category: Palliative Care Tags: opioids pain rosielle The profession Source Type: blogs
Herbert Kleber
Jeffrey A. SingerToday ’sGoogle Doodle is about Dr. Herbert Kleber, a noted U.S. psychiatrist who died on October 5, 2018. After his early work with addicted inmates at a national prison in Kentucky, he became very disappointed with the results of what was, in effect, abstinence therapy augmented by work assignments and group therapy sessions —which had been the standard approach in the 1960s. This approach was associated with a roughly 90 percent failure rate.His research at Yale and later at Columbia University was largely responsible for the now widespread acceptance of methadone, and now other forms of what is refe...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 1, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
A Flood of Irresponsible Actions and Advice on Respiratory Disease Outbreak
There is a wave of irresponsible recommendations and actions that are taking place in response to the outbreak of more than 400 cases of severe, acute respiratory disease and five deaths that have occurred in the United States. Since there are far too many to write an individual commentary on each, I am combining three of the most important examples in this post.1. Dr. Thomas Eissenberg Implies that the Respiratory Disease Outbreak is being Caused by Traditional (nicotine-containing) Electronic CigarettesIn anop-ed piece inThe Guardian entitled " Vaping Is Risky: Do Not Do It If You Care About Your Lungs, " Dr. Thomas Eiss...
Source: The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary - September 8, 2019 Category: Addiction Source Type: blogs
Will Congress Finally X-Out the " X " Waiver?
Members of Congress are growing more appreciative of the benefits of Medication Assisted Treatment in addressing the overdose crisis. Two bills presently under consideration —one in the Senate and one in the House—are the latest evidence of that awareness. Medication Assisted Treatment for opioid use disorder is one of the most widely-accepted and least controversial of the tools in the harm reduction tool box. The strategy involves placing the patient on an orally-administered opioid that binds with enough opioid receptors to prevent painful withdrawal symptoms while, at the same time, not producing cognitive impa...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 16, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
New Evidence From British Columbia Provides a Strong Case for Harm Reduction Strategies
A study published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Addiction by researchers at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use found that harm reduction strategies were responsible for the province ’s opioid-related overdose death rate being less than half of what it otherwise would have been between April 2016 and December 2017.The researchers noted that 77 percent of opioid-related overdose deaths during that time frame involved illicit fentanyl. Vancouver has long been a major port of entry for fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, produced in China and other parts o...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 8, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
CDC Provisional Drug Death Numbers Show Slight Improvement. Credit Harm Reduction.
Provisional data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest the annual overdose death rate may be levelling off or even slightly declining. The data predict a drop in the death rate to 69,096 for the 12-month period ending November 2018, down from 72,300 predicted deaths for the 12-month period that ended November 2017. These provisional findings represent a 4.4 percent drop in the national overdose rate. The drug overdose death numbers include deaths due to natural and semi-synthetic opioids, synthetic opioids other than methadone (fentanyl and its analogs), methadone, methamphetamines and ot...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 26, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
Toward a Healthy Relationship with Opioids
In the June 14thWall Street Journal, Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Travis Rieder, in an excellent essay, shared with readers his battle with pain resulting from a devastating accident, the effectiveness of opioids in controlling the pain, and the hell he went through when he was too rapidly tapered off of the opioids to which he had become physically dependent. Like most patients requiring long term pain management with opioids, he developed a physical dependence, which is often mistakenly equated with addiction by policymakers and many in the media. The aggressive schedule launched me into withdrawal, and I l...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 17, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
What are the Different Drugs Used for Heroin and Opioid Detox?
Understanding Heroin and Opioid Detox
When someone is struggling with addiction to heroin or opioids, it can be almost impossible to quit cold turkey. This is due to unpleasant withdrawal symptoms, as well as intense drug cravings. When someone quits cold turkey, they will have to experience all these debilitating withdrawal symptoms and manage strong cravings on their own. This is extremely hard to do without the assistance of medication during heroin and opioid detox.
According to Medline, about 948,000 people used heroin during the past year. In the same year, about 11.5 million people were nonmedical users of narcotic ...
Source: Cliffside Malibu - May 7, 2019 Category: Addiction Authors: Jaclyn Uloth Tags: Addiction Addiction Recovery Addiction Treatment and Program Resources Detox Resources for Alcohol and Drugs/Opiates Painkiller Substance Abuse drug detox heroin heroin addiction heroin users luxury heroin rehab medical medical det Source Type: blogs
Can I Detox From Methadone?
What is Detox from Methadone Like?
Methadone is a long-acting opioid medication. It was originally designed to help people in treatment struggling with addiction to opioids, such as heroin. It is used to slowly wean people off of heroin and opioids so that they do not experience sudden and unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. However, methadone in and of itself has addictive properties as well, as it is a Schedule II controlled substance. This means it has a high potential for abuse and can produce physiological dependence in users.
Many people who were once addicted to heroin may become addicted to methadone for these reasons....
Source: Cliffside Malibu - May 1, 2019 Category: Addiction Authors: Jaclyn Uloth Tags: Addiction Addiction Recovery Addiction to Pharmaceuticals Addiction Treatment and Program Resources Detox Resources for Alcohol and Drugs/Opiates drug detox medical detox medicated-assisted detox methadone opiate abuse opiate addiction Source Type: blogs
Libertarians and Harm Reduction
Last week we held a day-long conference at the Cato Institute devoted to exploring the strategy known as “harm reduction” to address the rising rate of drug overdose deaths and the spread of infectious diseases, such as hepatitis and HIV. In my remarks at the beginning and at the conclusion of the conference, I pointed out that the harms afflicting the drug-using community and their intimate contacts are the direct result of drug prohibition. Cato ’s Jeffrey Miron emphasized that point in a key presentation and discussed the success Portugal has had in reducing overdose deaths, HIV, hepatitis, and the heroin add...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 26, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
For Those Who Are Serious About Increasing Access to MAT for Opioid Use Disorder …
The synthetic opioid methadone, developed in Germany in the 1930s for the treatment of severe pain, has been employed for the Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) of heroin addiction and opioid use disorder since the 1960s. In the US, methadone clinics are tightly regulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Patients receiving methadone to treat their addiction must ingest it under the observation and supervision of clinic staff, who keep it in a lock box. Eventually, patients are permitted to take a few doses home with them for use over the weekend, a...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 25, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
My Son Didn ’t Have to Die from Opioids: An Interview with Bob Paff
Zach (left) and Bob (right)
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, more than 70,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017, including illicit drugs and prescription opioids, a two-fold increase in a decade. Opioids include prescription opioids and methadone, heroin, and other synthetic narcotics like fentanyl.
Bob Paff has directly suffered the casualties of this epidemic. On January 21 of this year he lost his son Zach to an accidental overdose of fentanyl. A highly sought-after communications expert, business leader, and internationally recognized author, Bob now uses his communications platform to bring ...
Source: World of Psychology - February 24, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Therese J. Borchard Tags: Addiction General Recovery Stigma Opioid Epidemic Opioids Suicide synthetic fentanyl Source Type: blogs
The Church of Safe Injection
One major negative of drug prohibition is that it causes riskier ingestion methods. Prohibition raises drug prices, which encourages injection to get a big bang for the buck. Prohibition also fosters restrictions on clean syringes, which means users exchange dirty needles, increasing the transmission of HIV and other diseases.Prohibition also increases overdoses, since potency is difficult to assess in a black market.Hence theChurch of Safe Injection:Lewiston, Maine: On an 11-degree night here this month, an unconventional mass was held outdoors, next to a 2017 Honda parked on a street corner.The altar took the form o...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - January 30, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey Miron Source Type: blogs
