Since I started Suboxone treatment 15 months ago, I’ve had my Google Alerts set to track news and blog posts for mentions of Suboxone and Buprenorphine (the active ingredient in Suboxone). Many of the items alerted are news reports of drug busts, where the bustee was caught with some heroin or Oxycontin - and a few Suboxone pills as well. Other alerts are people posting on message boards looking for advice or support regarding the use of Suboxone. And then there are the Suboxone rants.

Usually I just pass up these angry blog posts. Today however I allowed myself to be sucked into one of these rants, and I realized that there are many people who feel the way this woman does, and I just can’t let this one go unchallenged. I can’t reply to this post directly (I’m not a member of Live Journal) so I’m going to respond to it here:

ok… withdrawal from some drugs sucks but you can get off them if you want. what did people do to recover before these ‘wonder drugs’? some just knuckled under and did it in the rooms and some went to hospitals. the thing is, these medications should be only short term solutions. im all for making detox easier, i guess, but how is an addict detoxing from anything if they are still on an addictive substance? another thing about detox/withdrawal… shouldnt we feel some discomfort and pain? i think so because if it were easy we would just forget that there was any problem in the first place. make things easier on an addict and they seek the easy way.

These are all common arguments against medically assisted recovery. The first statement, that withdrawal sucks but you can get off the drugs if you want, is contradictory to the whole idea of addiction. If we could get off the drugs because we “wanted” to, then we wouldn’t be addicts, would we?

It is true that addicts in medically assisted recovery are NOT usually detoxing. If you are in the process of tapering off your medication, you are detoxing, but if you are on maintenance treatment you are not detoxing. But that is not the point. Just because we are not in the process of detoxing does not mean we can’t be recovering. For some people, maintenance treatment is the only thing that provides enough stability to allow recovery to begin.

My favorite part of this whole paragraph is “make things easier on an addict and they seek the easy way.” Well, duh. Are there people, even those who are not addicts, who routinely seek to do things the hard way? And why, pray tell, should we NOT want to make it easier for addicts to recover? Trust me, if they announced a vaccine that would cure me from addiction tomorrow, I would be the first person in line to get it. Until then, I thank holy science for delivering a successful treatment for my medical problem. That’s right, medical problem, as in disease - not a moral failing that for which I must be punished with the pain of cold-turkey withdrawals. I’m pretty sure that most addicts have suffered copiously during our active addiction. I think it’s pretty cruel to insist that we must suffer for our recovery too.

suboxone and other opioid treatments are good but like methadone, its a short term treatment. why do doctors insist addicts be on detoxifying meds for long periods of time? heroin is kickble, ask jimmy k and all the oldtimers in NA. they kicked without all these wonder drugs and you know what? there was a much higher success rate of recovery back then then there is now with all the wonder drugs…

Hmm…I’m not really sure how she’s arriving at the claim that more people recovered back in the “old days” when methadone maintenance and Suboxone were unavailable. She doesn’t provide a citation or any data to back up this claim. As to why doctors insist that addicts be on “detoxifying meds” for long periods of time - there are research studies that indicate that opiate addicts have better success rates (fewer relapses, longer periods between relapse, fewer injections, lower HIV rates) when they are on long-term maintenance therapy as opposed to short-term detox therapy. This seems to contradict her assertion that we were better off in the days before medically assisted recovery.

…my drug of choice is primarily alcohol. in the past 15 years ive detoxed from it seven times. every time i detoxed it was done with medical supervision and in an inpatient setting. im a very low bottom drunk with a very serious alcohol addiction…

Here we see evidence of just how difficult it is to maintain sobriety. The author has relapsed and detoxed seven times since she’s been in recovery. We know that addiction is a progressive disease, and that each relapse brings with it the danger of overdose and death. One of the great things about Suboxone is that it makes it difficult to relapse -because it has a high affinity for opiate receptors, it is difficult for a person on Suboxone to feel the effects of opiates.

why are doctors so keen to make detox easy? i understand why we addicts want this. withdrawal is probably the single biggest reason most of us leave treatment. the thing is this: do we want to have to be on replacement drugs the rest of our lives? it was the addiction that was killing most of us, not the withdrawal. most addicts will not die from withdrawal yet more and more are medicated and the success rates in recovery continues to go down. we make addicts reliant on doctors and clinics instead of dealers. the doctors has become the new dealer and a lot of us will do almost anything for our “fix”.

She’s right, withdrawal is probably one of the biggest reasons why addicts leave treatment. And like I said above, relapse is inherently dangerous, especially for opiate addicts.  I’m sure that the nightmare that withdrawal presents for addicts also scares many of us away from recovery. We now have ways to take the fear and pain out of withdrawal and to enable more addicts to have some success in recovery. This is unequivocally good, in my humble opinion. And while I can only personally attest to the effects of Suboxone, I will say that it has hardly turned into a “fix”, nor has my doctor become my dealer.

once real recovery is sought then we find that we were just fooling ourselves. we didnt need anything to help kick except for maybe in the very beginning to not die. if youre on any of these medications just know that this blog is my opinion but its also the opinion of many others. dont fool yourself with ideals of what methadone, suboxone and other drugs are. they are drugs and they do nothing but keep withdrawal minimal. thats it.

Ah, yes, “real” recovery. That’s the thing that all of us over here in “fake” recovery aspire to, I suppose. Except that my recovery feels very real to me, as I’m sure it does to many addicts on Suboxone or Methadone. I work hard on my recovery and I have made real gains in the past year. And I don’t kid myself - I know this would be much harder without Suboxone. Believe me, I tried to quit, and I failed repeatedly.

Suboxone made it possible for me to end the madness of active addiction, hopefully forever. It does more than just make withdrawal more bearable or keep it at a minimum. Suboxone also suppresses cravings and curbs the obsession that opiate addicts are plagued with. Cravings and obsessive thoughts can last far past the withdrawal stage of recovery and are responsible for many relapses back into active addiction. Knowing that relapse can be fatal, I find taking a small pill every day to be a small, small price to pay for freedom from the urge to use (not to mention the back-up insurance of knowing that even if I do use, it won’t work.)

It’s true what the author states, this blog is her opinion, and the opinion of many others. This opinion is harmful though, and I hope people who hold these opinions will take some time to do some research and talk to some of us addicts who are recovering with the aid of medication. Some of the saddest stories I run into on the Internet recovery community are the ones of folks who quit medications that were really helping them after encountering opinions like these.

*All quotes are taken from pattiglolt’s livejournal post: The New Crutches…