The Anti-Addiction Pill That's Big Business For Drug Dealers

it doesn't work on most drug addicts and two go to the streets to buy it abuse it and stay junkies

Suboxone is buprenorphine + naloxone. The naloxone is an opioid agonist added specifically to prevent abuse. I understand that naloxone's affinity for opioid receptors is lower than buprenorphine but that's by design -- you want to treat the addiction, not punish the user.

that blocks any "high" from subsequent narcotic use. Junkies are using this stuff to stay straight and taper off and this hardly can be classified as "abuse."

Drug policy in this country is insane. Moralists have been running it for far too long and it's high time for them to be shoved aside in favor of a non punitive approach.

Or at least not for a long time, and not without a complete change in the way we think about addiction. There is just too much money in the "churn", the people going into and out of residential drug treatment over and over. And our society is hooked on labeling people for life and treating them accordingly.

One step forward, two steps back. I completely agree that there are too many economic incentives for continued criminalization of addiction, and then there's the cultural issues. Heaven forbid there's a substance that still gets addicts slightly buzzed but allows them to function, and that it should be easily available and affordable.

And even when progress is made, it often doesn't filter all the way down into the treatment scenarios most addicts encounter. Thinking regarding addiction becomes nearly as ingrained as religion and it's difficult for any new information to break through. The idea of "purity" = sobriety, you can't have any "substance" in you and claim to be off drugs. Getting better isn't acceptable, it's all or nothing. Unfortunately that leaves way too many people going the "all" route and dying in the process.

It's all or nothing -- smokers must either go off nicotine completely, or they're failures. OTC nicotine replacement methods are too low dosed. Safer nicotine delivery methods, like Swedish snus, have been taxed so that they're as expensive or more than cigarettes thus providing an economic disincentive to quitting cigarettes, and they're gunning for e-cigarettes next. Meanwhile, only a quarter of people who become addicted to smoking ever manage to quit entirely. Zero nicotine use is best, but why just getting smokers to not smoke, even if it means they need to feed their nicotine addiction for life, is degrees better than lifelong smoking.

maybe it will trickle down from the betty ford clinic.