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

Posted 1/19/2022 (updated 3/26/2024)

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.