Laurel to the Baltimore Sun for spotlighting abuse and street sales of buprenorphine, a widely hailed prescription drug for treating opiate addiction, in a series of well-reported articles published late last year. And a mini-dart to the same series for ultimately failing to put the “bupe” problem in proper context (see Editor’s Note, page 9).
As the Sun explained, bupe is a significant advance over methadone, the long-dominant treatment for heroin and painkiller addiction. Methadone provides a stronger high than bupe and can be fatal in an overdose. Suboxone, an FDA-approved form of buprenorphine, forestalls euphoria past a certain dosage and contains an agent, naloxone, intended to trigger withdrawal symptoms when crushed and injected. Most coverage of buprenorphine has touted the drug’s resistance to abuse and its proven effectiveness in combating addiction. The Sun’s three-part series and follow-up articles brought important balance to the bupe story by vigorously raising the issue of street sales and the specter of addicts using “street chemistry” to subvert naloxone to achieve an opiate high.
Reporters Doug Donovan, Fred Schulte, and Erika Niedowski hit the streets to document abuse and diversion in West Baltimore, New England, and France. They discovered that little data exist on bupe’s role in overdose deaths because many medical examiners have no way to detect traces of the drug. The street reporting was the story’s strength. Much of the enthusiasm over buprenorphine is based on its success in research settings, but the reporters searched out patients, doctors, and medical examiners to chronicle its effects in the real world.
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The following disclosure connected to this Darts & Laurels piece ran in the Editor's Note in the September issue:
Darts & Laurels has a venerable history at this magazine and it will soon extend its empire onto the Web, where it will gain from the immediacy of that venue. In the magazine we are experimenting with it. Last issue we ran a long Dart and a short Laurel around coverage of the same subject. This time we have what is likely our first qualified Laurel, with both praise and criticism for a single ambitious effort, at the Baltimore Sun. The Sun’s series is about a relatively new drug called buprenorphine, or “bupe,” which has been hailed as better than methadone in helping people trying to get off heroin or painkillers. What the Sun reported in a major series is that bupe is being abused and sold on the street. Many people in the drug rehab community think bupe is a huge advance, and that, while there is abuse, the Sun made a mouintain out of a molehill. After a lot of reporting, CJR and its writer, Lawrence Lanahan, essentially disagreed, concluding that the Sun’s piece was a valuable contribution, though flawed. Thus the Laurel with a mini-Dart.
The Sun’s excellent reporters, meanwhile, argued to us that CJR had a conflict of interest—two, actually. So full disclosure: one of our major funders, the Open Society Institute (OSI), has a drug-addiction initiative that is apparently pro-bupe. And our writer, Lanahan, once worked for the American Institutes for Research (AIR), which has a subset that contracted with the government in the bupe rollout. For the record: we had no idea of OSI’s bupe initiative until people at the Sun told us about it. OSI has many initiatives and we don’t keep track of them. As for AIR, it too has many projects. Lanahan worked for one of its educational research institutes and had never heard of buprenorphine when he left the place in 2005.
Posted by Mike Hoyt on Tue 7 Oct 2008 at 12:41 PM
How did GDP become GPD?
Posted by Bruce Rusk on Tue 11 Nov 2008 at 09:56 PM
Sorry that somehow ended up on the wrong article. Please ignore.
Posted by Bruce Rusk on Tue 11 Nov 2008 at 10:00 PM