Behind Bars – Pleas For Buprenorphine Go Nowhere

WHERE’S BIG PHARMA WHEN YOU NEED THEM? –

Dec. 18, 2024 – For nine months, while incarcerated in a county jail in Portland, Maine, he pleaded for a medication called buprenorphine. Mannion, a barber, recreational fisherman, and father of two, was once a regular heroin user, but had used the medication to eliminate the cravings and withdrawal he experienced whenever he tried to quit opioids cold turkey.

Buprenorphine had worked before for Mannion, just as it has worked for millions of others, helping him to avoid using far more dangerous illegal drugs like heroin and fentanyl.

On Aug. 11, 2022, a doctor working at the jail examined Mannion and concurred with his self-diagnosis: He had opioid use disorder, and had once benefited from Suboxone, a common buprenorphine brand. Mannion had repeatedly written to jail officials reporting “daily cravings” for heroin and a fear that denying him buprenorphine would end in disaster. “I want help,” he wrote at one point. Later, he added: “If my cravings don’t go away, my mental state is going to get worse and worse.”

His pleas went nowhere. Three days later, Mannion was found dead after overdosing on opioids he had obtained from another inmate. “His cold body was discovered in his cell with no pulse, a clenched jaw, and blood in the mouth,” a representative of Mannion’s estate alleged in a federal lawsuit.