Heroin addiction drug won’t be free of charge

A NEW drug to treat heroin addiction, which arrived on the Irish market yesterday, is not being given out for free under the medical card or any drug treatment scheme.

Suboxone was launched in Ireland yesterday and pharmacists will start to dispense it once the Department of Health decides how it should be paid for.

The Merchants Quay project, which helps addicts, welcomed the introduction of the drug onto the Irish market, saying it will offer an alternative to methadone — the only drug previously available to addicts.

Chairman, Tony Geoghan, said: “This offers an alternative so that we don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach. Some people don’t like methadone. It has a long-lasting effect and it is often difficult to come-off. I think people who are on methadone for a long time might start using this drug.”

Suboxone, created by Schering Plough, is designed to be taken by placing the pill under the addict’s tongue. It contains two main ingredients — buprenorphine, which helps manage the cravings associated with opiate withdrawal, and naloxone. The latter is only activated if the user tries to inject it — this ingredient may speed up withdrawal symptoms in opiate dependent patients which makes the drug unattractive for misuse.

More than 8,000 people in Ireland now use methadone to treat their addiction, and can get it in pharmacies free of charge under the Government’s methadone scheme.

However Mr Geoghan has expressed concern that the Government may not be as willing to pay for Suboxone, which could prove to be more costly.

Professor Eric Strain of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, said: “When we talk about addiction we usually think well if they stop it will they go into a withdrawal syndrome and that’s true of morphine or heroin or methadone. Suboxone seems to have less of a withdrawal syndrome than medicines like morphine or methadone.”

He said Suboxone is safer because it is more difficult for addicts to inject, as they sometimes do with methadone.

“In the US 40,000 patients were treated with it last year and there seems to be very low rates of people dissolving it and injecting it.”

Mr Geoghan explains that even if an addict did use heroin its effects would be cancelled out by Suboxone.

Prof Strain said: “The treatment community is realising that there’s a role for methadone and Suboxone.”