Getting help with addictions
A Bell Island man says he can’t get a prescription for a drug he believes is a better treatment for OxyContin addiction. Craig Lahey contacted The Telegram after reading a story Monday about the struggles of an Oxy addict’s family.
A Bell Island man says he can’t get a prescription for a drug he believes is a better treatment for his OxyContin addiction.
Craig Lahey contacted The Telegram after reading a story Monday about the struggles of an Oxy addict’s family before the young man finally got on methadone. The wait list for the program is about nine months.
But Lahey said there’s another drug — Suboxone — that should be used to treat opiate addiction.
He said he first tried Suboxone when a cousin gave him some of his pills.
Then Lahey says he got a one-time prescription from a local doctor and when that ran out, sought a prescription from another doctor, but was refused.
Lahey said he was told they don’t want to prescribe it because there isn’t enough clinical experience with the drug in Canada.
Suboxone — a trade name for the narcotic buprenorphine — is approved by Health Canada for sale in Canada.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Newfoundland and Labrador has extensive guidelines on its website for prescribing Suboxone.
Lahey said it’s worked for him, but with nine pills left, he doesn’t have enough to run the course of treatment — about two months. He’s not quite a month into taking the Suboxone.
“There is a cure out there and they don’t want to put it out there,” he said.
Lahey said he was working for about 25 years in Ontario, but became debilitated after a car accident in 2005. He said that’s when he was prescribed Percocet and then OxyContin, and if he knew what he knows now, he never would have accepted the OxyContin. He moved home as a result of the accident.
“I wouldn’t have put it in my mouth if I knew about the downfall,” he said.
“It’s the devil in pill form. … It gets in the cells of your body. You can’t be normal without one of those pills in you.”
Besides the pain, it cut his stress, but like many other people he became dependent on Oxy, buying pills on the street — upwards of $900-a-month for an OxyContin or OxyNEO habit — after he was no longer being prescribed them.
When his cousin, who had a prescription from out of province, offered him the Suboxone at Christmas time, he said he didn’t need the OxyContin pill.
“I was normal. I felt like I was before,” he said.
“I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Waking up in the morning, I put more clicks on my car over (Oxy) pills, and burned more gas.
I tried a dozen times. God knows I tried. And when my cousin came down and gave me some (Suboxone), they worked. … Fifteen, 20 minutes later you don’t even think about OxyContin.
Craig Lahey
It’s just tormenting and I just didn’t want it.”
He first started with one Suboxone pill, cut it down to half a pill and said he’ll go to a quarter pill beginning next week.
Lahey said he had tried to quit OxyContin cold turkey before and made it 14 days.
“And the 15th day, I hit a bit of stress and back on the pill again,” he said.
“I tried a dozen times. God knows I tried. And when my cousin came down and gave me some (Suboxone), they worked. … Fifteen, 20 minutes later you don’t even think about OxyContin.”
Lahey said he doesn’t think methadone works, even though he hasn’t tried it. He said he knows people who have been on it.
“That’s the real McCoy heroine, that methadone. That’s no mellow drug. That’s hard on your body, too. It rots your teeth out. I got nice teeth and I don’t want to lose my teeth,” he said.
According to Eastern Health, physicians at the Opioid Treatment Centre in St. John’s do not generally prescribe Suboxone.