What we miss when we focus on opioid treatment and recovery
A version of this post was originally published in September 2019.
Fortunately, there’s been growing concern that advocates, policymakers, and media have too narrowly focused on the opioid crisis. Up to this point, it hasn’t reached the level of media coverage.
USA Today is one of the first to publish an article that explores the limitations of the nation’s focus on opioid treatment and recovery:
More than eight years into his opioid-addiction treatment, Paul Moore was shooting cocaine into his arms and legs up to 20 times a day so he could “feel something.”
The buprenorphine he took to quell cravings for opioids couldn’t satisfy his need to get high. Moore said he treated himself like a “garbage can,” ingesting any drug and drink he could get, but soon enough, alcohol and weed had almost no effect unless he vaped the highest-THC medical marijuana available.
Cocaine, however, especially if it was mainlined — now that could jolt him from his lifelong depression to euphoria.
The article provides several important messages:
- The importance of addiction treatment over opioid use disorder treatment for many (if not most) patients, because polysubstance use problems are the norm and agonist treatments do not treat other substance use problems.
- Along similar lines, messages about opioid recovery can be misleading for patients, families, and communities.
- These issues raise the importance of clarity about the boundaries of recovery. For example, were these people in recovery when they were in opioid use disorder treatment and reduced or quit using opioids, but were still using cocaine and experiencing poor quality of life due to untreated addiction? (This would have been an uncontroversial and easy question to answer just a few years ago. Today, there are many saying that any movement toward wellness or participation in harm reduction is recovery.)
- The article also highlights what gets missed when agonist treatments (buprenorphine and methadone) are described as the most highly effective and highly successful treatments without more context. They rarely answer the question, effective at what? (This isn’t saying that these medications aren’t useful or don’t have a place in care. Rather, it’s important that journalists and experts do not oversell their evidence for effectiveness. Goals like overdose prevention are incredibly important but, generally, recovery only follows overdose prevention with addiction treatment of adequate quality, duration, and intensity.)
Failure to clarify and communicate these messages is likely to result in increased stigma for addiction and recovery.
Rather than communicating that addiction is a treatable illness, the unintended message will be that addiction more closely resembles a chronic disability than a treatable illness that has a good prognosis when the patient receives treatment of adequate quality, duration, and intensity.
This century’s first wave of recovery advocacy was built upon the message that we can and do recover when we get the right help and support. In this context, recovery meant something resembling the Betty Ford Consensus Panel definition:
Recovery from substance dependence is a voluntarily maintained lifestyle characterized by sobriety, personal health, and citizenship.
The traditional understanding of addiction recovery alludes to the restoration of people in their families, communities, and a life in alignment with their goals and values.
Adjustments to that understanding are likely to result in readjustments in the public’s attitudes, which are eventually likely to result in readjustments in policy.