Amber Hollingsworth (addiction counselor) gives a personal and professional opinion on Suboxone (an opioid partial agonist combined with naloxone). She endorses medication-assisted treatment at a societal level—citing reduced crime and stabilization for some patients—but criticizes it as insufficient for many individuals, arguing it addresses only biological dependence and can impede the psychosocial hard work recovery requires. The speaker notes that many clients try Suboxone as a 'bargain' and later choose other routes; she points viewers to other interviews for corroborating stories.
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In this video, I'm going to talk about what I personally and professionally really think about Suboxone. Now, this video might upset some people, and if it does, that's okay. I'm just telling you what I think about it. If you don't know what Suboxone is, it's actually an opiate medication. Well, actually it's half opiate, which, if you don't know what that is, it's kind of like pain pills. Same thing. Or heroin also. Same thing. It's half opiate and half opiate blocker. There's a blocker in it called naloxone, which actually blocks opiate receptor sites. And this is a huge sort of like controversial topic out there in the world of addiction and recovery. There are people all over it. Pro medication assisted treatment, which is the fancy term against it. Sort of the old school way of getting in recovery. And in this video, I'm going to tell you all about what I personally and professionally think about the issue. Okay, I have two ways I actually feel about this medication. On one hand, on a big sort of like global, cultural, societal level, I'm all for it because I think it helps reduce crime. I think it's sort of like a damage control kind of thing. I think it helps people that have no other choice to sort of stabilize out in their drug addiction so they stop doing all of the stealing and sometimes they can even function well enough to go back to work. So. And that for that reason, I'm all for it on a big sort of global, cultural level, the big level. But on a individual level, for the clients that I work with, I'm not the biggest fan. And I know that seems kind of like a contradiction. You might not be against something big out there, political in the world, but you might think it's not the best thing for your kid. That's kind of the way I feel about Suboxone is actually helpful purely on like a biological level. Yes, I think that addiction is a disease and it's on a biological level, but it's more than that. And I think that's really just one component of it. So I feel like the medication part of it really just hits that one level of it. And for that reason, I ultimately don't see people really getting way better from Suboxone. In fact, what I've really seen is that most people that have an addiction to pain pills or heroin, same thing, they try this. Suboxone is one of what I call the bargains. So in addiction recovery, anytime someone's getting better the fancy way to say it is stages of change. They're figuring this whole thing out. They go through what I call the bargaining stage, which is, well, let me cut it back, or let me try this, or let me just do $500 worth cocaine a month. Let me just drink beer and not liquor, whatever. All these bargains that people go through. And I think Suboxone, for most of the people that we see in our office, is really just another one of those bargains because they think, well, let me do this, because I don't want to stop altogether. It's kind of like an easier quick fix. And so they do it for a while, but ultimately they end up deciding it's not working, because usually they keep using. They abuse the Suboxone, they sell the Suboxone because they haven't really addressed the psychological parts of addiction. And that is the bigger piece. You see, the truth of it is we can get. Medically, we can get anybody off pretty much any substance in about five days. You can detox people off substances to get them sort of physically tapered down, to deal with the physical dependency part of the issue. But that's not really the hard part. It's the psychological part. You got to get in there for someone to really get better. And in recovery, they've got to deal with all that stuff. They've got to rewire how they handle stress, how they cope with problems. They've got to fix all the messes that have been made in the meantime while this addiction is built. And so for the clients that we see in my office, it's not that we tell them they can't be on Suboxone. We don't really tell them that they can't. Most of them try it for a while, and honestly, they decide for themselves this just isn't going to work, because they still feel stuck in the same old scenario. And ultimately, if you want to feel better, if you want to have that spiritual change, if you want your whole life to get better, you're gonna have to put in the hard work. And unfortunately, one of the side effects of Suboxone is it kind of like makes you feel better enough that you're not really that motivated to put in all that really hard work that it takes to really get recovery. It's a lot of hard work. It's a constant battle. It's a constant sort of willingness and work through all the stuff all the time. You have to always be mindful of your thought processes and your intentions and your willingness and be humble about things. And it's just. It's a ton of work. And so if you're comfortable enough, because the medicine will make you sort of stabilized enough, you don't really get in there and do that hard underneath kind of work to fix the underneath issues that are probably prompting the addiction to begin with. So I guess you can wrap it up by saying, I'm not really totally against it on a big picture level, but on an individual level, most of the people that I see end up deciding for themselves that that's just not going to work and they want to do something else. Now, if you don't want to take it from me, check out the video that I made with Casey. He tells you his story about how he's tried all that. He's tried all the different things, how he felt about those things, and in the end, ultimately, what he chose. So if you don't want to take it from me, take it from someone else that's been there. In fact, if you look at all the interviews I've done so far with all the people in recovery, every one of them in their interview have talked about trying Suboxone, and in the end they decided that wasn't going to work for them and they went a different route. So don't take it from me, take it from them. Now, I know this is a big, complicated, opinionated topic, so let me know how you feel. Tell me, do you agree with me? Do you disagree? Disagree with me? If you don't, that's okay. I can handle that. Let me know your thoughts on the subject. For tons more information on all things addiction and recovery and lots of free expert advice. Make sure and subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss a thing.
