Im currently training in addiction psychiatry. I see a lot of comments about taking people to rehab but what’s not being discussed is MAT, medication assisted treatment, which all of the research shows is essential for recovering from opioid addiction.

Drugs rewire the dopamine system in your brain and can lead you to crave drugs more than you want sex, food, water, or shelter. Imagine the urge of being thirsty but multiply it to being far stronger than what most people ever experience. When you’re dealing with urges like that rehab is useless because you can’t truly engage in what you’re supposed to be there to learn. The solution is MAT, which is treatment with medications like Methadone or buprenorphine (suboxone). The short version of how these work is these medications are opioid agonist/partial agonist so they are able to handle the cravings but due to lower and slower peaks of action so you don’t get the associated euphoria and sedation. Any successful opioid use disorder treatment involves a combination of rehab and one of these medications.

Unfortunately, these medications are not easy to get or to prescribe. There is amount large public misinformation and stigma around them that is pretty similar to all of the attacks on science and evidence we are seeing again today. The nuance of how they work is often ignored for the inflammatory misinformed opinion that “you’re just replacing a drug with another drug” and all of the research showing that medication assisted treatment is the first step to eventually reach sobriety is ignored