Author: QuittingOpiatesSweden
Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2012 6:53 am
| tearj3rker wrote: |
| So no long-term maintenance in Sweden? That’s interesting! I kinda understand the reasoning behind needing to prove addiction for 2 years, because while it prevents people getting on the program needlessly, it also sounds a bit risky? There are some new addicts who are incredibly high risk of harm to self/others.
Do many people abuse Sub in Scandinavia like people say? I’ve heard that many prefer buprenorphine to heroin up there? Here in Aus we have free detoxes run by charities such as the Salvation Army, Uniting Church. They receive some public funding. I did a number of detoxes for no $. Thank God for the Salvos! Of course there’s the private ones which cost like $1500 a DAY, mainly covered by private insurance. I have to pay $5 AUD per day for my Sub, regardless of what dose I am on. And I go to the pharmacy around 3 days a week now. |
There is long term maintenence, but you have to fail and relapse after time based suboxone treatments a few times before they decide to put you on long term maintenence or put you on methadone.
Yes the 2 year thing does cause harm, specially because it requires 2 years of PROVED drug use. So if you just come to an addiction clinic and say "I’ve been using heroin for 10 years" then you can’t get on any substitution program, unless you have given them a positive drug test at least two years earlier. But even if you can prove that you have taken a positive drug test over 2 years ago, you most often have to try some abstinence based treatments a few times first and only if you still relapse after several tries (which of course almost all opiate addicts going into abstinence based treatments do), then you can be eligable to try to get on a substitution based treatment.
However if you screw up and relapse during a substitution based treatment, the treatment will most likely be terminated and you will not be allowed to apply for treatment for a year. Which is really backwards from how things ought to work. There are some really good doctors who care a lot and will work hard to try get you back on the treatment, but most just follow the regulations that say that a patient who relapses during treatment must be dismissed from the treatment and banned from trying it again for a year.
The Swedish drug policy is officially opposed to harm reduction methods of any type, we are the only western country that doesn’t have needle exchanges for example, even in Iran they have needle exchanges but nope not in Sweden.
"It should be hard to be a drug user" is the official line. We do have some of the lowest rates of drug use in Europe, but still we have some of the highest rates of drug related deaths.
All parties from left to right in the Swedish parliament write in their party programs that they oppose the idea of harm reduction, and they even try to push this Swedish way of what they think is "tough love" on the EU community. When ever there is a vote about some drug related issue in the EU, Sweden is ALWAYS on the side of more restriction, less chances to try harm reduction methods, less chances to increase substitution treatments and so on. If we weren’t in the EU and had to follow various EU rules about human rights and health care standards, we probably wouldn’t even have allowed substitution treatments.
You asked if people abuse sub here, yes they do. I’ve been offered to buy it a number of times, never wanted it though. I’ve never heard anyone say that it would be better than heroin or better than any other regularly used opiates and opioids.
The opiate addiction scene here is almost entirely heroin. There pill market for painkillers is very small, and is almost entirely about tramadol. There are people like me who buy foreign codeine pills online, but it’s a very small part of the opiate problem, and most people who buy those are heroin addicts who are trying to quit or stay low for a while. My doctor said he had never had a patient who had codeine as his main addiction to such a degree that it would even require the patient to stay for detox, never mind substitution treatment.
The reason why this part of the opiate problem is so small here is probably that there is very little problem of overprescription of pain meds here, actually it’s probably the other way around, the idea that you would take anything stronger than paracetamol for things like having your wisdom teeth removed or a gall bladder surgery seems very strange here, the use of addictive pain meds is very very restrictive. Also we never had those over-the-counter codeine-mixture pills like you had until some year ago in Australia.
I know about that because I was in Melbourne three times in 2009-2010, and the way I didn’t go into complete withdrawal every time I went there, was because I would taper down my dose the weeks before traveling, bring a reasonable therapeutic dose travel matching the time I was to stay, that no customs would ever bother with (even though they did ask me once what I took it for), even though that’s just like half a day’s use for my normal level of consumption. And then while I was there, buy plenty of those mixture pills, even though it’s a super-tiny dose in each. It’s a bit scary because they’re all mixed with dangerous substances, but my liver is healthy, and I’m not prone to bleeding so I was not afraid.
But since I took the maximum safe dose of the paracetamol+codein pills, plus the max safe dose of ibuprofen+codeine pills, plus one of those 25 mg pills that I brought from home every day, at least I didn’t go into any major withdrawal and was able to enjoy my time there. A friend there told me recently though that they have stopped selling those over the counter pills now because of the widespread addiction they cause.
