It’s Complicated –
August 13, 2019 – Doctors and pharmacists also receive different education about how long buprenorphine should be prescribed before tapering a patient off the drug. Medical providers sometimes prescribe it for long-term treatment, based on recent SAMHSA guidelines, while pharmacists may view longer courses of treatment as intensifying the risk of long-term dependency.
“It’s not even that they’re on different pages,” says Ventricelli. “It’s that they’re reading completely different books.” If a patient going through withdrawal can’t quickly get buprenorphine, the stakes are high, says Silvana Mazzella, associate executive director at Prevention Point — patients may be more likely to turn back to heroin or fentanyl.
“We’re in a situation where if you are in withdrawal, you’re sick — you need to get well,” she says. “You want help today, and you can’t get it through medication-assisted treatment. Unfortunately, you will find it a block away — very quickly and very cheaply.” Doctors with Prevention Point have found a pharmacy near the bupe bus — the Pharmacy of America — that will reliably dispense buprenorphine to their Philadelphia patients.
