He Knows Everything, Not! –
NOV. 27, 2018 – For one thing, he supports the use of buprenorphine. Drugs like buprenorphine lessen withdrawal symptoms and the cravings that lead to relapse and overdose. While in rehab, Grinspoon was told, ‘A drug is a drug is a drug.’ “This mentality does not allow for a difference between the powerful opiate fentanyl, which kills thousands of people every year, and buprenorphine, which is a widely-accepted treatment for OUD,” he posted. Grinspoon also sees a problem with the abstinence-only approach many rehabilitation centers have adopted. “I have come to believe that an uncompromising ‘abstinence-only’ model is a holdover from the very beginnings of the recovery movement, almost 100 years ago, and our understanding has greatly evolved since then,” Grinspoon said. “The concepts of addiction and recovery that made sense in 1935, when Alcoholics Anonymous was founded, and which have been carried on by tradition, might not still hold true in the modern age of neurochemistry and functional MRIs.” Given the opioid-overdose death rate, “uncompromising” is the key word.
