New Mexico’s senior U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich is leading a bipartisan call for the Drug Enforcement Administration to make the opioid addiction medication buprenorphine more accessible. In a letter to the agency this week, the group of senators argued the DEA needs to be more transparent about its policies.
Buprenorphine is an evidence-based treatment for opioid use disorder that reduces cravings and can lower the risk of overdose by as much as 40%, according to a recentstudy. However, in order for it to save lives, people addicted to opioids need to have access to it — andthe vast majority do not.
In the letter, Heinrich and 16 other senators, including three Republicans and New Mexico’s other Democratic Senator Ben Ray Luján, expressed concern that the DEA has a hand in the problem.
They’re calling on the agency to join with the Food and Drug Administration and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in evaluating the accessibility issue and resolving it.
“It shouldn’t be harder to get a prescription to treat opioid use disorder than it is to get opioids in the first place,” Heinrich told KUNM in a statement.
The senators argued that the DEA hasn’t done enough to make its regulations understandable — not only to patients, but also to those prescribing and dispensing the medication.
Legislation signed in December did away with a waiver needed to prescribe the medication, which had been a significant bureaucratic barrier to getting access to the treatment. Eliminating the “X-waiver” upped the number of providers nationwide from 130,000 to 1.8 million, according to the letter. But getting a prescription isn’t the only blockage in the system — a patient also needs to be able to fill it.
A key hurdle to taking the medication, according to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, is pharmacies not having it in stock. The senators say there’s a common misperception that the DEA imposes ordering limits on the drug, which helps fuel the empty shelves. They argue more can be done to clarify that such a cap doesn’t exist, and are calling on the agency to issue formal guidance on the matter.