A Plea From People Who Use Drugs to Clinicians: New Ways to Initiate Buprenorphine Are Urgently Needed in the Fentanyl Era

Abstract

With the worst opioid overdose death crisis in the United States history, urgent new approaches to assist people who use drugs onto medication for opioid use disorder are necessary. In this commentary, addiction medicine clinicians and drug user union representatives align to argue that conventional ways of buprenorphine initiation that require periods of withdrawal must be augmented with additional novel approaches to initiation. In the fentanyl era, members of the New England Users Union and Portland Users Union report encountering precipitated withdrawal, being unable to stop using full agonist opioids for a required period of time, and difficulty initiating this medication that could offer them some stability and life-saving treatment. People who use drugs should be involved at all levels with ongoing research, clinical and policy efforts to improve buprenorphine initiation as their lives and their suffering are at stake.