“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” — Abraham Maslow There's a new push to promote buprenorphine maintenance. If you believe that drug-free recovery is not possible for opiate addicts, headlines like "For Painkiller Addicts, Suboxone Means Freedom, Dependence" and "Prescription Opioid Addiction Can Be … Continue reading Goodbye detox, hello maintenance
Category: Policy
Rx opiate deaths surpass heroin and cocaine combined
From the CDC: Deaths from prescription painkillers* have reached epidemic levels in the past decade. The number of overdose deaths is now greater than those of deaths from heroin and cocaine combined. A big part of the problem is nonmedical use of prescription painkillers—using drugs without a prescription, or using drugs just for the "high" … Continue reading Rx opiate deaths surpass heroin and cocaine combined
A silk purse
Here it comes: After losing U.S. patent protection in 2009 for its Suboxone tablet, designed to help heroin users quit, Reckitt Benckiser has said that the entrance of a generic competitor could erode pharmaceutical sales and profit by 80 percent. Reckitt Benckiser, which gets most of its revenue from selling home and personal-care products like … Continue reading A silk purse
binge drinking=binge spending
Yikes: The CDC estimated excessive drinking cost society nearly $224 billion in 2006, the most recent year for which all necessary statistics were available. That worked out to about $1.90 per drink, 80 cents of which was spent by federal, state or local governments, the researchers estimated. The rest came from drinkers, their families, … Continue reading binge drinking=binge spending
Is alcohol dependence a chronic relapsing disorder?
To me, there's a lot in this article that intimates an ideological agenda, but it makes an important point. Insufficient attention has been paid to the entire distribution of those with alcohol dependence. We believe that a chronic relapsing disorder model is not a useful conception for understanding the experience of the majority of people … Continue reading Is alcohol dependence a chronic relapsing disorder?
Remember prohibition
I'm unfamiliar with Kevin Sabet and I suspect he's be more conservative than me on drug policy, but I like this article he wrote on prohibition and its lessons. a closer look at what resulted from alcohol prohibition and its relevance to today’s anti-drug effort reveals a far more nuanced picture than the legalization lobby … Continue reading Remember prohibition
Sentences to ponder
Sometimes I think that the legalizers and the drug warriors have a secret arms-control treaty, in which each side renounces the use of factually and logically sound arguments. —Mark Kleiman [hat tip: Margaret Wente]
empathy fail
The former president of the International AIDS Society and head of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in AIDS/HIV has new appreciation for the experience of addicts: “I understood everything I was going through, and yet I tell you, it was probably the worst seven to 10 days of my life,” said Dr. Montaner, former president … Continue reading empathy fail
Caretakers in the crosshairs?
This blog has previously discussed the need to balance the goal of reducing the number of opiate prescriptions that end up misused with the need to provide good pain management for patients with chronic pain. Prosecutors are stepping in: Fatal overdoses from prescription painkillers more than tripled to 13,800 in the United States in 1999 … Continue reading Caretakers in the crosshairs?
Some would never qualify for release
Someone tweeted this drug policy proposal the other day: We need to do something effective to rid them of the addiction, and protect the public from drug-related crime so long as they are addicted. That means addicts should be segregated from society until they are no longer addicted. Put them in jail for long terms? … Continue reading Some would never qualify for release
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