Something Great Happened Today

 

 

 

 

Today we admitted a young man to our opioid treatment program who was referred from a Big City Hospital, where he was started on buprenorphine/naloxone. Everything happened exactly like it should, and the patient got excellent care. This should happen everywhere.

This patient went to the emergency department at Big City Hospital at the urging of his family, who recently discovered he had opioid use disorder. They were worried about him and convinced him to seek help at the hospital close to them, BCH.

Big City Hospital admitted him for detoxification and started him on a low dose of a buprenorphine product. Over the four days that they kept him, they slowly increased his dosage to a total of 8mg per day. At that dose, his withdrawal symptoms resolved, and he had no cravings to use illicit opioids. BCH also drew blood from him, and he tested negative for infectious diseases and other medical problems.

Once he was stable, the social worker at Big City Hospital needed to find a program or provider  his community that could take over his care. As it happened, he wanted to move away from where he’d been living. He feared his friends, with whom he’d using drugs, could lead him to relapse back to drug use. He decided to move in with some supportive relatives, who happen to live near our opioid treatment program. The social worker called our program and arranged an appointment for admission for the day after he was to leave BCH.

BCH gave him a dose the afternoon he was discharged from their hospital, and he kept his appointment with our program early the next morning. He was just starting to feel a little withdrawal from his last dose of buprenorphine. Big City Hospital had already faxed his records to us, so those were available for me to review.

He was a nice young man from a good family who had fallen, as so many have, into opioid use disorder before he knew what was happening. He had a strong desire to change his life and leave his addiction behind. We continued his dose of buprenorphine products, and started intensive counseling right away.

I’m so happy that appropriate treatment was offered to this young man at the time he reached out for help. He was admitted, started on treatment and then transferred to us without any gap in treatment. A successful inpatient treatment episode flowed seamlessly into our outpatient program, without relapse and without the patient being forced back into withdrawal.

All worked as it should. It’s not that hard.

So how can a large hospital nearly a hundred miles away refer a patient to us but we don’t get referrals from our local hospital a few miles away?

My answer is that though our local hospital is close in miles, it’s far away in its ideology about the role of buprenorphine and methadone in the treatment of patients with opioid use disorder.

However, there’s reason to hope that this is changing.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to come to the hospital to give a presentation of opioid use disorder and its treatment with medication for nursing personnel. I was thrilled. Our program director and clinical director were thrilled. We scheduled a “Lunch ‘N Learn” for noon, with the hospital graciously furnishing the food.

I was surprised and pleased when a room full of people showed up for my talk. The head of pharmacy was there, who has always supported MAT, with a few pharmacy students. None of the staff nurses were there, but nursing supervisors were, and some people from our local mental health agency, who just got a grant to care for pregnant ladies on MAT. We had the director of the local health department, who has always been supportive, and many other people. Two doctors and at least two physician assistants were there too.

I gave my usual 50-minute presentation, and the audience asked great questions when I was done. Then, to drive the message home, we had a former patient tell her story of life on methadone, off methadone, and now back on methadone. She has that gift of speaking from the heart, and I think she helped inform audience members more than anything I could have said.

I wanted to get copies of TIP 63 to pass out to all people in the audience, but it was bad timing – TIP 63 wasn’t available because it’s being re-done. I like to give people TIP 63 because when they challenge me on this point or that, it contains all the pertinent studies supporting what I say about MAT.

One audience member appeared to disapprove of starting pregnant patients with opioid use disorder on methadone or buprenorphine. She claimed that all babies born to moms taking these medications had withdrawal when born, and that the withdrawal lasts for many months. I tried to describe the results of the MOTHER trial, done right here in North Carolina, since it was one of the most recent landmark studies.  It showed that around 50% of babies born to moms on buprenorphine or methadone have withdrawal bad enough to need medication, and that babies born to moms on buprenorphine had much less severe withdrawal and stayed in the hospital about half as long as babies born to moms on methadone.

I did not get through to her. I sensed she relied much more on her own perceptions and experiences than on data from research studies done on hundreds of patients.

Despite that disagreement, I thought the event was a great success.

Now we are asking to come back and do another presentation for the staff nurses.

We’ll keep trying. Someday I hope to see a local patient who arrives in our local hospital’s emergency department, gets diagnosed with opioid use disorder, is treated in a respectful and compassionate way, gets started on buprenorphine and then gets referred to our opioid treatment program (or other MAT program) right away.

I’d like to see a Big City response to our rural crisis.

Spending Holidays with the Family

 

 

 

The holidays are upon us. For many people in recovery and their families, this means family celebrations and interactions. Many of us feel stress about this. No matter how much we love our relatives, there can be misunderstandings and hurt feelings. To help families identify what could lead to problems, I composed this guide last year, and I decided to re-run it this year:

What to do:

1. Do invite your loved one in recovery to family functions, and treat her with the same respect you treat the rest of the family. If you have resentments from her past behavior, you can address this privately, not at the holiday dinner table. Perhaps given how holidays can magnify feelings, it’s best to keep things superficial and cheery. Chose another time if you have a grievance to air.

 

2. Allow your relative some privacy. If the person in recovery wishes to discuss her recovery with the entire family, she will. Let her be the one to bring it up, though. Asking things like, “Are you still on the wagon or have you gone back to shooting drugs?” probably will embarrass her and serve no useful function.

 

3. Accept her limitations graciously and without comment. Holidays can be trigger for drug use in some people, and your relative may want to go to a 12-step meeting during her visit. Other people in recovery may need some time by themselves, to pray, meditate, or call a recovering friend. Allow them to do this without making it a big deal.

 

4. Remember there are no black sheep. We are all gray sheep, since we all have our faults. In some families, one person, often the person with substance use disorder, gets unfairly designated as the black sheep. She gets blamed for every misfortune the family has experienced. Don’t slip into this pattern at holiday functions.

 

What not to do:

1. Don’t ask the recovering person if she’s relapsed. If you can’t tell, assume all is well with her recovery. If she looks intoxicated, you can express your concern privately, without involving everyone.

 

2. Don’t use drugs, including alcohol, around a recovering person unless you check with them first. Ask if drug or alcohol use may be a trigger, and if it is, abstain from use yourself. If you must use alcohol or other drugs, go to a separate part of the house or to another location.

 

Being around drugs including alcohol can be a bigger trigger during the first few years of recovery, but any recovering person can have times when they feel vulnerable, so check with them privately before you break open a bottle of wine.

 

If your family’s usual way of celebrating holidays is to get “ all liquored up,” then understand why a recovering relative may not wish to come to be with family at this time, and don’t take it personally.

 

For some of us, remaining in recovery is a life and death issue, so please accept we will do what we must to remain in recovery, even if that means making a holiday phone call rather than making a holiday visit.

 

3. If your recovering loved one is in medication-assisted treatment with methadone or buprenorphine, don’t feel like you have the right to make dosage recommendations. Don’t ask “When are you going to off of that medication (meaning methadone or buprenorphine)?

 

Your loved one may taper off medication completely at some point, or he may not. Either way, that’s a medical decision best made by the patient and his doctor. Asking when a taper is planned is not your business.

 

4. Remember your loved one is more than the disease from which they are recovering.

Some people have diabetes and some people have substance use disorders. These diseases are only a small part of who they are.

 

Refrain from giving hilarious descriptions of your loved one’s past addictive behavior, saying, “But I’m only joking!” This can hurt her feelings, and keep her feeling stuck with an identity as a drug user. She can begin to believe that with her family, being an addict is a life sentence.

 

I hope this helps.

 

May all my readers have a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

 

Book Review: “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America,” by Beth Macy

Dopesick, by Beth Macy

This well-written book has it all: compact information about how the opioid epidemic started, how our nation failed to act early to mitigate the damage of the epidemic, and how the epidemic shifted into our present predicament. The author did a great deal of research and talked to experts with vital information, but she humanized this data with personal stories about people affected by the opioid epidemic. She told this story not only from the view of the person with opioid use disorder, but also illustrated the grief of families who lost loved ones. The prolonged grief of families who have lost loved ones to opioid overdose deaths is rarely examined as well as it is in this book.

This is a book that will be staying on my shelf for a re-read.

The author is a journalist who works for the Roanoke Times newspaper, so this book focuses mostly on events in the western part of Virginia.

Avid readers on this topic will recall the book “Painkiller,” by Barry Meier, who also covered rural Western Virginia. Ms. Macy’s book picks up where Mr. Meier’s left off. They talk about many of the same communities and the same treatment providers, fifteen years later.

Mr. Meier’s book, published in 2003, could have been an early warning to the U.S. healthcare system. Unfortunately, the book wasn’t widely read, so few people took any note of what was going on, other than those of us already working in the field. I understand Mr. Meier wrote a second edition of “Painkiller” this year, and I plan to read and review it.

The most remarkable theme of Ms. Macy’s book is how the opioid use disorder epidemic grew worse over the past fifteen years. After physicians finally stopped prescribing so many opioid pain pills, these pills were less available on the black market. Many people with opioid use disorder switched to cheap and potent heroin.

In Ms. Macy’s book, she tells the experience of a rural physician, Dr. Art Van Zee, who was also interviewed for Barry Meier’s book. He was one of the brave people who stood up at conferences and raised the question about the ethics of Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of OxyContin, when it wasn’t easy to question anything about that drug company. He’s the first physician I can recall who actively sought answers about his perceived over-prescribing and mis-marketing of OxyContin.

This isn’t in the book: I remember Dr. Van Zee at an Addiction Medicine conference called “Pain and Addiction: Common Threads,” that I attended in 2003 o4 2004. I bought the recordings of the conference, because I was so excited to learn more about Addiction Medicine. I remember a recorded session where Dr. Van Zee asked a question after a lecture, asking – as I remember it many years later – why Purdue Pharma was still peddling their OxyContin as a relatively harmless opioid for chronic pain, while he was seeing patients with lives destroyed by this drug.

It was one of those moments where all you hear are crickets. His question wasn’t answered, but rather he was reprimanded by the speaker. He was cautioned to remember our conferences were sponsored in part by Purdue money, and that appropriate prescribing of OxyContin was a huge benefit to patients. He was told it wasn’t the drug, it was the prescribing that needed to be fixed.

Fast forward to 2007. As described in “Dopesick,” Purdue Pharma pled guilty to fraudulent marketing of OxyContin, which was a felony misbranding charge. Purdue paid $600 million in fines. Its top three executives pled guilty to misdemeanor versions of the same crime, and ordered to pay a total of $34.5 million.

So yes, inappropriate prescribing was a big part of the problem, but Purdue deliberately misinformed physicians about potential dangers of the drug, which contributed to inappropriate prescribing. From a 2018 perspective, that speaker’s answer to Dr. Van Zee seems disingenuous at best.

Dr. Van Zee’s perceptions, based on his clinical experiences, were correct. Around that same time, I was seeing the same thing in rural Western North Carolina. I remember having twenty to thirty new patients show up on admission day, all of them were using OxyContin, almost exclusively. This drug was easy to crush to snort and inject, and Purdue knew it.

Purdue Pharma testified before congress in 2003 that they were nearly ready to release a new formulation of their OxyContin pill that was more abuse resistant. As it turns out, that new formulation wasn’t released until 2010. With that change, people with opioid use disorder changed to other opioids, easier to misuse, such as Roxicodone and Opana. Eventually Opana underwent reformulation to a less abused form.

But I digress; back to the book. The author’s first few chapters summarize the history of opioid use disorder and the factors that lead up to the release and promotion of OxyContin. It related how this drug crept into the social fabric of Southwestern Virginia, and how early attempts to sound an alarm about its abuse were met with contempt from drug company representatives.

Chapter Three tells of the “unwinnable” case brought against Purdue Pharma by Virginia attorney general John Brownlee. He went up against the famous Rudy Giuliani, who was one of the lawyers who represented the drug company, and successfully negotiated the eleventh-largest fine against a pharmaceutical company. This chapter contrasts this legal victory with the devastating grief of parents who lost their children to overdose death with OxyContin. The book describes the creation of the “OxyKills.com” message board, which became a sort of a database for overdose deaths. The chapter after that contains depressing descriptions of how Purdue Pharma’s corporation executives and the owners, the Sackler family, distanced themselves from the profound harm caused by their medication and criminal mis- marketing.

The next several chapters contain the tragic stories of people who became addicted to opioids, and their journeys through the criminal justice system, the addiction treatment system, and the pain their families felt, every step of the way. The author illustrates the ridiculousness of our patchwork system of care for people with opioid use disorder, and how ineffective treatments are often pushed as first-line options.

Then the book details efforts to pursue the heroin ring that sprang up in Virginia, and how the ringleader, a man named Ronnie Jones, was eventually arrested, charged and convicted of trafficking heroin from Baltimore to the Roanoke suburbs. Many of Jones’ drug runners were addicted young adults, many female, from Roanoke’s suburbs. Families were shocked when they found out their children were involved with the drug trade. Heroin used to be an inner-city drug, but times have changed. Heroin is now plentiful in suburban and rural areas, as this book illustrates repeatedly.

I was most interested in the author’s description of available treatments. Usually I dread reading writers’ summaries of treatment for opioid use disorder. If they describe medication-assisted treatment at all, it’s often couched in negative terms. However, this author did her homework.

She describes the accurate reasons why medication-assisted treatment with buprenorphine and methadone is the gold standard of treatment, and even writes about some of the success stories. However, she also writes about the more common public perception of buprenorphine: “shoddy” prescribers located in strip malls who don’t mandate counseling or do drug testing patients. She writes about the poor opinion of Virginia law enforcement officials, who criticize doctors for not weaning people off the drug, and for allowing patients to inject the drug & sell it on the street.

However, it’s clear the author was able to grasp harm reduction principles, and latest research findings, since she said (on page 219) the unyielding opposition to MAT was the single biggest barrier to reducing overdose deaths.

I felt gratified to read this in print. I underlined it.

She also pointed out how some states’ refusal to expand Medicaid when given the opportunity kept many people with opioid use disorder from being able to access treatment. That’s more perceptive than I expect from a writer who isn’t trained in public health or substance use disorder treatment.

But my favorite part of the book was on page 221, where an addiction counselor named Anne Giles said of the opioid overdose death epidemic: “We should be sending helicopters!”

I underlined this too.

She pointed out that if the same number of people dying from opioid overdoses were dying of Ebola, the government would be sending helicopters of medical help to rescue people and contain the epidemic, and she’s right. We ought to be sending helicopters….helicopters loaded with emergency medical personnel and treatment medication. (By the way, per most recent data from NIDA, over 49,000 people in the U.S. died from opioid overdose in 2017. That’s one-hundred and thirty-four people per day. If they were dying from Ebola…helicopters for sure.)

So I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in this topic. Even if you aren’t interested, it’s so well-written that it will entertain you. I particularly appreciate the author’s talent at describing so many facets of this opioid epidemic and the obvious scope of her research.

Purdue Pharma Settles Kentucky Lawsuit

 

 

 

 

 

 
Since 2007, Kentucky has been litigating a case against Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. Kentucky was the only state to opt out of a prior settlement offered by Purdue Pharma in 2007, preferring to litigate separately against the company, due to the devastation that state has endured from the opioid addiction epidemic.

Kentucky was offered $500,000 to settle with Purdue in 2007 lawsuit. Last month Purdue agreed to pay Kentucky $24 million to settle the case. This money is earmarked to pay for addiction treatment and prevention.

This does sound like a large sum of money, but it’s a drop in the sea of money Purdue has raked in from sales of OxyContin.

The turning point in the case may have been when Purdue Pharma lawyers were unable to get the case moved out of Pike County, Kentucky. Those lawyers probably knew county residents were likely to be bitter about the drug company’s antics, since the county’s overdose death rate is still extremely high.

In 2014, 51 people out of every 100,000 died from drug overdose, according to data on the state’s website (http://odcp.ky.gov/Pages/Overdose-Fatality-Report.aspx ) Of course, OxyContin is not the only reason for the overdose deaths, but citizens selected as jurors may have jumped at the chance to blame someone. Who better than a drug company? The company lawyers were facing the potential for an astronomically high judgement from jurors with the case heard in Pike County.

The drug company lawyers decided to play it safe, and settled for 24 million dollars. Purdue Pharma and its officials did not admit any guilt in this settlement.

This isn’t Purdue Pharma’s first legal loss. As you will recall from my July 8, 2015 blog post, Virginia won an award of $634 million from Purdue and from its top three executives after they pleaded guilty in May of 2007 to misleading the public about the drug’s safety. It was one of the largest awards against any drug company for illegal marketing…though Purdue made 2.8 billion dollars in sales from the time of its release in 1996 until 2001. How much the company made since 2001 is anyone’s guess but it has to be in the billions.

When I started working at my first opioid treatment program (OTP) in 2001, the only drug I heard about was OxyContin. The majority of the patients entering treatment used only Oxy’s, as they called them. Patients told me how easy it was to remove the time release coating, then crush the pills to snort or inject. All during this time, Purdue Pharma was touting their product as abuse-resistant.

Needless to say, their claims rang hollow in my ears, and the ears of other doctors treating addiction

Eventually, the U.S. General Accounting Office asked for a report about the promotion of OxyContin by Purdue Pharma. By 2002, prescriptions written for non-cancer pain accounted for 85% of the OxyContin sold, despite a lack of data regarding the safety for this practice. By 2003, primary care doctors, with little or no training in the treatment of chronic non-cancer pain, prescribed about half of all OxyContin prescriptions written in this country. By 2003, the FDA cited Purdue Pharma twice for using misleading information in its promotional advertisements to doctors. [1, 2] Purdue Pharma also trained its sales representatives to make deceptive statements during OxyContin’s marketing to doctors. [3]

Testifying before Congress in 2002, a Purdue Pharma representative said the company was working of re-formulating OxyContin, to make it harder to use intravenously. This representative claimed it would take several years to achieve this re-formulation. The re-formulated OxyContin was finally approved by the FDA in 2010, eight years later. Currently, this medication forms a viscous hydrogel if someone attempts to inject or snort the medication. It isn’t abuse-proof; probably no opioid will ever be so, but it is much more abuse-deterrent than the original.

Did Purdue Pharma drag their feet in this re-formulation? Experts like Paul Caplan, executive director for risk management for the drug company, said there were issues about the safety of incorporating naloxone into the pill to make it less desirable to intravenous addicts. He also pointed out that some delay in approval was due to the FDA.

For comparison, Sterling Pharmaceutical, when it became widely known patients were abusing their pain medication Talwin, re-formulated within a year, adding naloxone to the medication and reducing its desirability on the black market. Since this was in the 1980’s, I would assume there was less technology to help back then, compared to 2002.

I’ll let readers draw their own conclusions.

No one in the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, has been criminally charged with any crimes.

1. General Accounting Office OxyContin Abuse and Diversion report GAO-04-110, 2003.
2. 2. United States Senate. Congressional hearing of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, on Examining the Effects of the Painkiller OxyContin, 107th Congress, Second Session, February, 2002.
3. 3. Washington Times, “Company Admits Painkiller Deceit,” May 11, 2007, accessed online at http://washingtontimes. com/news/2007/may/10/20070510-103237-4952r/prinnt/ on 12/18/2008.

North Carolina Pregnancy & Opioid Exposure Project

Imagine being in a room filled with more than four hundred people: social workers, nurses, substance abuse counselors, and doctors specializing in obstetrics, pediatrics, and addiction medicine. Every one of them are there to learn how to care for pregnant women using opioids or addicted to opioids.

This actually happened earlier this month at the POEP conference in Greensboro, NC. (POEP stands for Pregnancy & Opioid Exposure Project. You can learn more about this organization at their website: http://www.ncpoep.org )

This organization, funded through a federal block grant through the NC Department of Mental Health, is run by the UNC School of Social Work. The organization has managed to bring together many of the people in our state who take care of pregnant women with opioid addiction. The goal of POEP is to disseminate information, resources, and technical assistance regarding all aspects of opioid exposure in pregnancy. The organization was formed in 2012 in response to concerns about the problem of pregnant women being exposed to opioids.

This organization is talking about all opioid use in pregnancy, not only about addiction in pregnancy. Some pregnancy women are prescribed opioids for the treatment of pain. These women may have physical dependence on opioids, though they may not have the mental obsession and compulsion to take opioids. However, the same problems can be seen in the newborn whatever the reason the woman takes opioids, so there is overlap in the problems faced.

This conference had renowned speakers; Marjorie Meyer, an expert in maternal-fetal medicine from Vermont, was the keynote speaker. This doctor participated in the MOTHER trials, and also set up an innovative treatment method in Vermont for mothers addicted to opioids. She has written about her data, and contributed greatly to our knowledge about buprenorphine in pregnancy (see my blog post of February 28, 2015).

Dr. Hendree Jones, lead author of the MOTHER study, did an excellent session on myths about medication-assisted treatment in pregnancy. She’s also a world-renowned leader in the field of addiction in women.

Dr. Stephen Kandall was there, and spoke about the challenges of advocating for women with addiction, with some historical perspective. He wrote an outstanding book, “Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in the United States,” which is one of my all-time favorites. It’s one of the best books about females and addiction. This conference was the first time I met Dr. Kandall, and I got all creepy-gush-y, and dithered about how much I loved his book. I can be such a nerd at times, but he was very polite and gracious.

There were many sessions going on at the same time, so it was impossible to go to all of the sessions that I wanted to attend. Other speakers talked about how best to coordinate care for pregnant women when they go to the hospital to deliver their babies, how to work with the court system if the pregnant woman has legal problems, and how to work with female patients on opioids about family planning.

I was honored to be one of the four-doctor panel that was organized to answer audience questions about medication-assisted treatment with buprenorphine and methadone during pregnancy. We got some great questions, like how to deal with co-occurring benzodiazepine use during pregnancy. Our session was only forty-five minutes long, and we probably could have spent a few hours answering all their questions. I was also impressed by the thoughtful opinions and recommendations from the other three doctors, all leaders in our state.

This conference was a great experience. I felt like many of the attendees got a better view of what opioid-dependent pregnant women need, and where and how to direct them for the best care. I’m pleased people in our state cared enough to start the difficult work of informing families and care providers about the problem of opioid use and addiction during pregnancy.

POEP has a great website that I’ll recommend to the pregnant women I treat, and I’ll also recommend it to their obstetricians. That site has clear information not only for families, but also for care providers. Here are the fourteen important points for infant care providers, taken directly from the POEP website:

“Key Messages for Infant Care Providers Working with Families of an Opioid-Exposed Newborn
________________________________________
1. Parents should be counseled as early as possible (preferably well before delivery) about the need for close monitoring of an opioid-exposed infant.[2]
2. Parents should be encouraged to disclose any maternal opioid use that occurred during pregnancy and should be treated in a nonjudgmental manner.[3]
3. Hospital care of the newborn should be family-centered, meaning that the parents should be a driver in the care plan.
4. Parents should receive education about how opioid-exposed infants are monitored and how neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) is treated at their delivery hospital.
5. There are various approaches to monitoring for neonatal abstinence syndrome in opioid-exposed infants, such as the use of the Finnegan Scoring tool.[2],[3]
6. Monitoring for the onset of NAS may mean the infant will be monitored in the hospital for up to 5 days.
7. Infants at risk of NAS may be monitored in the mother’s room, in the newborn nursery, special care nursery or neonatal intensive care, depending on hospital protocols and resources.
8. There are various approaches to the management of NAS including non-pharmacologic interventions and pharmacologic therapy, depending on the needs of the infant. Approaches include:
• Non-pharmacologic management of NAS: environmental controls emphasizing quiet zones, low lighting, and gentle handling. Loose swaddling, as well as holding and slow rocking of infant may be helpful. The use of a pacifier for excessive sucking is also helpful.[2],[6],[7]
• Pharmacologic management of NAS: the use of a variety of medication to ease the withdrawal symptoms of the infant. Common medications include opioids (dilute tincture of opium, morphine, or methadone) and phenobarbital.[2],[6],[7]
9. Breastfeeding is encouraged for women in medication assisted treatment, unless there are medical reasons to avoid it. Reasons to avoid breastfeeding include an HIV infection or specific medication for which breastfeeding is not safe.[2],[3]
10. Infants experiencing NAS may have difficulty establishing breastfeeding or bottle-feeding. Women may need additional encouragement and lactation consultation to support breastfeeding.[2],[3]
11. Whenever possible, having the newborn room-in with the mother while in the hospital is encouraged. Benefits include opportunity to initiate breastfeeding, bonding and decreased need for treatment of NAS.[1]
12. Some infants will experience NAS as a result of maternal opiate use through a treatment program (such as a methadone maintenance program) or by prescription (such as buprenorphine for an opioid use disorder or prescription narcotics for pain management). The opioid exposure alone in situations where the mother was adherent to a prescribed treatment plan would not constitute an appropriate reason for referral to Child Protective Services. See structured intake 1407 http://info.dhhs.state.nc.us/olm/manuals/dss/csm-60/man/
13. Not all infants at risk of NAS are identified in the hospital, particularly in situations where maternal use of opioids has not been disclosed. This may be due to women not disclosing legal or illegal use of opioids.[2]
14. Withdrawal symptoms from opioids may appear in the infant after discharge to home. It is important for providers working with the infant and the family in the community (pediatricians, CC4C, Early Intervention) to be aware of signs and symptoms of NAS. If the infant displays any of these signs or symptoms, the family should be encouraged to seek pediatric care promptly.[2]”

North Carolina has a great start in addressing the problem of opioid-exposed newborns. The organizers of POEP can stand as an example of how other states can begin to address this challenging situation. Neighboring states (you know I’m talking about Tennessee!) have walked in the opposite direction, preferring to view opioid use during pregnancy as a crime rather than the medical problem that it is. That’s sad, because an aggressive attitude of judgment is correlated with poorer outcomes for both mother and infant.

Congratulations to the organizers of the POEP conference. Hopefully it was the first of many more to come.

Helpful Websites for Patients on Medication-Assisted Treatment of Opioid Addiction

I’ve compiled some of my favorite web sites which deal with the medication-assisted treatment of opioid addiction. There are so many pitiful, ignorant sites on the web, it’s great to go to one of these for some sanity. 

http://www.methadonesupport.org/

This is just what the address suggests: a support site for people being treated with methadone for either addiction or pain. This site has message boards and discussion forums as well as good information for patients and their families. There’s information on pregnancy and methadone, with links to recent studies. There are several advocacy links. One describes current legislative challenges to treatment with methadone.

The forums have some interesting topics. For example, there was a thread with methadone clinic patients writing in to say what they would do if they saw a drug deal at their clinic. Would they notify clinic administrators or ignore it? The answers were interesting.

You can get information about Methadone Anonymous, and locations of current meetings. You can also enter a methadone anonymous chat room each evening between 8 to 9 EST, but you do need to register on the site to participate in meetings and to post on other sections.

This site it a little busy and some of it hasn’t been updated recently, but overall it’s a great site for support and information.

http://buprenorphine.samhsa.gov/

This is the website I give people when they’re trying to find a doctor who prescribes Suboxone. This is the most up-to-date list of Suboxone doctors, but it’s not 100% correct. Sadly, there are some doctors who don’t update their information at this site when they are no longer able to take patients. But besides the names, addresses and phone numbers of Suboxone doctors,, there’s some reliable information on this site about buprenorphine. This may be a site you pull up for a friend or family member who has misgivings about medication-assisted treatments of opioid addiction.

 http://www.methadone.us/

This is the best all-purpose site for information about methadone, information about opioid treatment centers, locations of treatment centers, and answers to FAQs about methadone. It also provides a link to a great blog: mine. I’m proud they carry my blog entries on their site. OK so maybe I’m a little biased, but check it out. It’s an extremely well-maintained site, and kept up to date with interesting and new information.

http://suboxonetalkzone.com/

This is a blog written by Dr. Junig, a physician who is obviously well versed in opioid addiction and its treatment with Suboxone. And it’s much more. He gives a link to his Ebook “User’s Guide to Suboxone.” I haven’t read it, but he says it contains information about situations that commonly arise during treatment with Suboxone, like acute pain management, surgery while on Suboxone, pregnancy on buprenorphine, and other problems. His blog has been around for many years, and I believe Dr. Junig is one of the first doctors to publically advocate for medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction, and I admire this.

http://store.samhsa.gov/home

If you’re interested in the disease of addiction and recovery from it, you’ve got to go to this website. It’s the government’s publication site, where many pamphlets, booklets, and bulletins are free. Even postage is paid, so go browse at the site. It’s arranged so you can search by topic, by audience (patient, family, health professional, etc.), or by drug. There are even DVDs which are available for a small charge.

http://www.casacolumbia.org

This is the website for the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. There’s great information here, though it’s not specific to medication-assisted treatments with buprenorphine and methadone. This site is packed with information about drug addiction, its treatment, and its costs to society. You can download CASA’s famous white papers about the following topics: “Adolescent Substance Use: America’s #1 Public Health Problem” or “National Survey of American Attitudes on Substance Abuse XV” or “Behind Bars II: Substance Abuse and America’s Prison Population.” These are excellent sources of information, much of it downloadable for free. My personal favorite is “You’ve Got Drugs,” about the ease of obtaining controlled substances over the internet.

CASA funds research of treatments for addiction, and also makes recommendations to policymakers in the country. They also provide information and help exchange of ideas between the government agencies, criminal justice system, service providers and education systems.

http://international.drugabuse.gov

This invaluable website is National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) summary of all the research studies about methadone, upon which our present treatment recommendations are based. If you need to know any facts about methadone treatment, you can probably get them here, along with references to support the information. If you are in medication-assisted treatment with methadone, you need to go to this site. You can download the whole of the Methadone Research Web Guide, and can take it to anyone who is pressuring you to “get off that stuff” to show them the science behind treatment with methadone.

http://www.indro-online.de/

If you travel out of the U.S., go to this website to see what other countries allow regarding buprenorphine or methadone. For example, the website tells travelers to Russia: “Methadone or buprenorphine must not be brought into Russia.” Using medication-assisted treatment with these two opioids isn’t legal in that country, and clearly it’s risky to travel with your prescription medication. The site does go on to say that if you must, travel with a letter from your doctor, translated into Russian.

I’ve referred to this site several times, looking to see what’s required for a patient who traveling out of the U.S. It’s an interesting site to peruse, to see how different countries are. There are tips about necessary phrasing for the doctor’s letter that’s usually required.

Readers, do you have suggestions for other great sites about medication-assisted treatment of opioid addiction?

Things You Can Do to Reduce the Impact of Addiction in Your Community

Sometimes it’s frustrating to hear repeatedly on the news that opioid addiction is such a problem. It’s easy to feel helpless about the situation, and doubtful about how you can help. In this blog entry, I’m going to describe some very specific things you can do to reduce the impact of addiction on our society.

• If you are an addict, get help immediately. Many people have so much shame about becoming addicted that they’re mortified to seek help, fearing the stigma attached to addiction and to an admitted addict, so it takes tremendous courage to admit you have this problem. If you are getting medications from your doctor, tell her the truth. Tell her you are misusing the medicine and need help. She should be able to guide you to an appropriate addiction treatment center, to get an evaluation. At a good treatment center, you should be informed of all of your treatment options. This should include information on both medication-free treatment and medication-assisted treatment.
• If you are doctor shopping for prescriptions, stop it now. As more and more doctors use their states’ prescription monitoring database, sooner or later you will be discovered by one of your doctors. In my state of North Carolina, doctor shopping is a felony, because it’s considered using false pretenses to get a controlled substance. Instead, get treatment. If you’re selling these medications, stop it before you go to jail or kill someone.
• Get rid of all old medication in your cabinets, especially if they are controlled substances like opioid pain pills, sedatives, sleeping pills, or stimulants. According to a recent survey, most young people got their first opioid drug from friends or family. Many times, they took what they found in their parents’ medicine cabinets, or in their friends’ parents’ medicine cabinets. Some communities have regular “drug take back” days, where people bring unused medication for disposal. If you don’t have these in your community, you can wet the pills and mix them with coffee grounds or cat litter, and then throw them in the garbage. The coffee grounds and cat litter will deter addicts looking for medication. Don’t flush pills in the toilet, because there are fears the medication can enter our water supply.
• Don’t share your medication, with anyone, even family. In this country, sharing medication is so common people don’t realize it’s a crime. Some people feel that if it’s their medicine, and they bought it, they have the right to do with it what they want. This isn’t true. Giving controlled substances to another person is a crime, and dangerous as well. Selling a controlled substance is even worse. Speak up to friends and family, letting them know you don’t think it’s OK for Aunt Bea to give Jimmy one of her Xanax pill because his nerves are bad today. Jimmy needs to see his own doctor.
• Give your children clear and consistent anti-drug messages. Don’t glamorize your own past drug use, including alcohol, by telling war stories. It should go without saying, though I’m going to say it: don’t use drugs with your kids, including alcohol and marijuana. Also, don’t err in the opposite direction, and exaggerate the harms of drug use, because you’ll lose credibility with your kids. Some may remember how the film “Reefer Madness” was mocked. Talk to your kids in an age-appropriate way about drugs and alcohol, even if they don’t appear to be listening.
• If you have a family member addicted to prescription medication, call their doctor to describe what you see. The doctor probably can’t discuss your relative’s treatment, unless given permission, but your doctor can accept information. Write a letter, and be specific with what you’ve witnessed. If your loved one runs out of medication early and then buys off the street, let the doctor know.
• If you feel your addicted loved one is seeing an unscrupulous doctor, report what you know to your state’s medical board. These professional organizations are the best equipped to review a doctor’s pattern of care, to decide if the doctor is prescribing inappropriately. Charts are often reviewed by other doctors who decide if the standard of care is being met.
• Underage drinking is serious. For each year you can postpone your child’s first experimental drug use, including alcohol, you reduce his risk of addiction by around five percent. (1) Don’t involve your kids in your own alcohol consumption; for example, don’t send you kids to the refrigerator to get you a beer. Don’t allow adolescents to drink in your house, fooling yourself with the idea of, “At least I know where they are.” Not only is it illegal, but it’s harmful.
• Don’t use drugs or alcohol to treat minor emotional discomfort, unless you have discussed it with your doctor. For example, don’t use pain pills to help you sleep. Don’t use the Xanax your doctor prescribed for your fear of flying to treat the sadness you feel from breaking up with a boyfriend. Try to get out of the mindset that there’s a pill for every bad feeling, and try to help your friends and family see this, too.
• See a doctor for the treatment of serious mental illness. Some mental disorders are so severe that they require medication. There are many non-addicting medications that treat depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders. Getting the appropriate treatment has been shown to decrease your risk of developing an addiction to alcohol and other drugs.
• Monitor your adolescent’s friends. Youngsters with friends who use drugs are more likely to begin using drugs. Of course, most youngsters who experiment with drugs and alcohol won’t develop addiction, but the younger experimentation begins, the more likely it is that addiction will develop. Older siblings can be a good or harmful influence.

1.  Richard K. Ries, David A. Fiellin, Shannon C. Miller, and Richard Saitz, Principles of Addiction Medicine, 4^th ed. (Philadelphia, Lippincott, Williams, and Wilkins, 2009) ch.99, pp1383-1389.

Description of Methadone Patients

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of my book, titled, “Pain Pill Addiction: Prescription for Hope.” In this chapter I’m describing the patients I saw at methadone clinics where I worked in the years 2001 through 2009.

 I was surprised how casually people shared controlled substances with one another. As a physician, it seems like a big deal to me if somebody takes a schedule II or schedule III controlled substance that wasn’t prescribed for them, but the addicts I interviewed swapped these pills with little apprehension or trepidation. Taking pain pills to get through the day’s work seemed to have become part of the culture in some areas. Sharing these pills with friends and family members who had pain was acceptable to people in these communities.

In the past, most of the public service announcements and other efforts to prevent and reduce drug use focused on street drugs. Many people seemed to think this meant marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin. The patients I saw didn’t consider prescription pills bought on the street as street drugs. They saw this as a completely different thing, and occasionally spoke derisively about addicts using “hard drugs.” Most addicts didn’t understand the power of the drugs they were taking.

 Some opioid addicts came for help as couples. One of them, through the closeness of romance, transmitted the addiction like an infectious disease to their partner. Most were boyfriend/girlfriend, but some were married. The non-addicted partner’s motives to begin using drugs seemed to be mixed. Some started using out of curiosity, but others started using drugs to please their partner. I was disturbed to see that some of the women accepted the inevitability of addiction for themselves as the cost of being in a relationship with an addicted boyfriend. Often, addicted couples socialized with other addicted couples, as if opioid addiction bound them like a common fondness for bowling or dancing. Addiction became a bizarre thread, woven through the fabric of social networks.

 We saw extended family networks in treatment for pain pill addiction at the methadone clinics. One addicted member of a family came for help, and after their life improved, the rest of the addicted family came for treatment too. It was common to have a husband and wife both in treatment, and perhaps two generations of family members, including aunts, uncles, and cousins. Many addicts who entered treatment saw people they knew from the addicted culture of their area, and sometimes old disputes would be reignite, requiring action from clinic staff. Sometimes ex-spouses and ex-lovers would have to be assigned different hours to dose at the clinic, to prevent conflict.

 When the non-profit methadone clinic where I worked began accepting Medicaid as payment for treatment, we immediately saw much sicker people. Over all, Medicaid patients have more mental and physical health issues. Co-existing mental health issues make addiction more difficult to treat, and these patients were at higher risk for adverse effects of methadone. However, data does show that these sicker patients can benefit the most from treatment.

 When I started to work for a for-profit clinic, I saw a slightly different patient population. I saw more middle class patients, with pink and white-collar jobs. Occasionally, we treated business professionals. The daily cost of methadone was actually a little cheaper at the for-profit clinic, at three hundred dollars per month, as compared to the non-profit clinic, at three hundred and thirty dollars per month. However, the for-profit clinic charged a seventy dollar one-time admission fee, to cover the costs of blood tests for hepatitis, liver and kidney function, blood electrolytes, and a screening test for syphilis. The non-profit clinic had no admission fee, but only did blood testing for syphilis. I believe the seventy dollars entry fee was enough to prevent admission of poorer patients, who had a difficult enough time paying eleven dollars for their first and all subsequent days.

The patients at the for-profit clinic seemed a little more stable. Maybe they hadn’t progressed as far into their disease of addiction, or maybe they had better social support for their recovery. This clinic didn’t accept Medicaid, which discouraged sicker patients with this type of health coverage. Both clinics were reaching opioid addicts; they just served slightly different populations of addicts. The non-profit clinic accepted sicker patients, which is noble, but it made for a more chaotic clinic setting. This was compounded by a management style that was, in a few of their eight clinics, more relaxed.

 For the seven years I worked for a non-profit opioid treatment center, I watched it expand from one main city clinic, and one satellite in a nearby small town, to eight separate clinic sites. The treatment center did this because they began to have large numbers of patients who drove long distances for treatment. This indicated a need for a clinic to be located in the areas where these patients lived. Most of this expansion occurred over the years 2002 through 2006.

 Three of these clinics were located in somewhat suburban areas, within a forty-five minute drive from the main clinic, located in a large Southern city. The other four clinics were in small towns drawing patients from mostly rural areas. One clinic was located in a small mountain town that was home to a modest-sized college. Nearly all of the heroin addicts I saw in the rural clinics were students at that college. But by 2008, we began to see more rural heroin addicts, who had switched from prescription pain pills to heroin, due to the rising costs of pills.

Within a few years, clinics near the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina were swamped with opioid addicts requesting admission to the methadone clinics. These clinics soon had many more patients than the urban clinic.

I saw racial dissimilarities at the clinic sites. In the city, we admitted a fair number of African Americans and other minorities to our program. Most of them weren’t using pain pills, but heroin. I don’t know why this was the case. Perhaps minorities didn’t have doctors as eager to prescribe opioids for their chronic pain conditions, or perhaps they didn’t go to doctors for their pain as frequently as whites. If they were addicted to pain pills, maybe distrust kept them from entering the methadone clinic. In the rural clinics, I could count the number of African-American patients on one hand. They were definitely underrepresented. The minorities we did treat responded to treatment just as well.

A recent study of physicians’ prescribing habits suggested a disturbing possibility for the racial differences I saw in opioid addiction. (1) This article showed statistically significant differences in the rate of opioid prescriptions for whites, compared to non-whites, in the emergency department setting. Despite an overall rise in rates of the prescription of opioid pain medication in the emergency department setting between 1993 and 2005, whites still received opioid prescriptions more frequently than did Black, Asian, or Hispanic races, for pain from the same medical conditions. In thirty-one percent of emergency room visits for painful conditions, whites received opioids, compared to only twenty-three percent of visits by Blacks, twenty-eight percent for Asians, and twenty-four percent for Hispanic patients. These patients were seen for the same painful medical condition. The prescribing differences were even more pronounced as the intensity of the pain increased, and were most pronounced for the conditions of back pain, headache, and abdominal pain. Blacks had the lowest rates of receiving opioid prescriptions of all races.

This study could have been influenced by other factors. For example, perhaps non-whites request opioid medications at a lower rate than whites. Even so, given the known disparities in health care for whites, versus non-whites in other areas of medicine, it would appear patient ethnicity influences physicians’ prescribing habits for opioids. The disparities and relative physician reluctance to prescribe opioids for minorities may reduce their risk of developing opioid addiction, though at the unacceptably high cost of under treatment of pain.

Interestingly, we had pockets of Asian patients in several clinics. We admitted one member of the Asian community into treatment, and after they improved, began to see other addicted members of their extended family arrive at the clinic for treatment. Usually the Asian patients either smoked opium or dissolved it in hot water to make a tea and drank it. When I tried to inquire how much they were using each day, in order to try to quantify their tolerance, the patient would put his or her thumb about a centimeter from the end of the little finger and essentially say, “this much.” Having no idea of the purity of their opium, this gave me no meaningful idea of their tolerance, so we started with cautiously low doses.

One middle aged patient from the Hmong tribe presented to the clinic and when I asked when and why he started opioid use, in broken English and with difficulty, he told me he had lost eight children during the Vietnam War, and was injured himself. After the pain from his injury had resolved, he still felt pain from the loss of his family and he decided to continue the use of opium to treat the pain of his heart, as he worded it. I thought about how similar his history was to the patients of the U.S. and how they often started using opioids and other drugs to dull the pain of significant loss and sorrow. I thought about how people of differing ethnicities are similar, when dealing with addiction, pain, and grief.

1. Pletcher M MD, MPH, Kertesz, MD, MS, et. al., “Trends in Opioid Prescribing by Race/Ethnicity for Patients Seeking Care in US Emergency Departments,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 2008 vol. 299 (1) pp 70-78.