Can’t Hurt –
Dec. 8, 2018 – Dan Ciccarone, who leads the Heroin In Transition research team at the University of California at San Francisco, argues that the U.S. at least needs to rapidly scale up the use of medications like methadone and buprenorphine, which only a select group of doctors are legally allowed to prescribe. As for heroin as a treatment option, he noted that the age groups in heroin-assisted treatment trials abroad skews older, even though the current heroin and fentanyl epidemics are much worse in younger age groups. “Few studies on agonist substitution are specifically done with youth,” he says. It seems unlikely that prescribing heroin to America’s young, addicted people would ever fly. But experts all agree that one way or the other, they need saving.
