Now it's easier for doctors to prescribe drug that helps beat addiction; rural areas have had fewer willing doctors

Photo by Joe Raedle, Getty Images, via Politico Pulse

Today the federal government lifts extra requirements for doctors who want to prescribe buprenorphine, a partial opioid that is used to help drug users beat addiction. That will be a boon for rural areas that have a disporportionate share of overdoses and a shortage of doctors willing to prescribe it.

Gone is "a time-consuming process that both discouraged doctors from prescribing the drug and created an unhelpful stigma around the medication, advocates say," Krista Mahr and Daniel Payne report for Politico Pulse. "As deaths from opioid overdoses reached record numbers, access to buprenorphine remained elusive: Just 11 percent of people diagnosed with opioid use disorder received FDA-approved medication in 2020.
 
That changed with the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act, "which was added to the year-end omnibus bill passed in December," Politico reports. "Practitioners who want to prescribe buprenorphine to their patients will still be required to get a DEA license, as they would any other controlled substance like morphine or Xanax. But they won’t have to face additional administrative requirements that have slowed down patient access to the drug for years."

Libby Jones, project director of the Overdose Prevention Initiative, told Mahr, “You could prescribe as much Oxycontin as you wanted without additional training, without an additional waiver. But in order to treat someone and provide a medication that prevents you from overdosing, you had to go through this extra step.”