Today the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released new guidelines waiving previous training requirements for doctors and other healthcare practitioners, allowing them to more readily prescribe buprenorphine to patients with opioid use disorder.

Buprenorphine is an opioid partial agonist, meaning it works on opioid neuroreceptors, albeit not as strongly as full agonists such as methadone or heroin. Treatment with buprenorphine may thus reduce withdrawal symptoms and make it less likely that a patient will misuse other opioids.

Reversing pandemic-related backslides in buprenorphine treatment

This new policy may ameliorate barriers to opioid use disorder treatment that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent study led by Dr. Janet Currie from Princeton University found that while existing patients with opioid use disorders maintained access to buprenorphine, the amount of new patients receiving buprenorphine decreased by about twenty percent in the first few months of the pandemic and only met 90% of projected levels by August 2020. The authors suggest that this potential decrease in access may be connected to the increase in opioid-related overdoses during the pandemic.

A similar policy to the one released today was announced during the final days of the Trump administration. The Biden administration came under fire this January for deciding not to enact the Trump-era policy, citing legal concerns about implementing the new guidelines. The present policy is broader, covering a wide range of practitioners rather than just doctors.

In a press release on behalf of the American Medical Association, Dr. Patrice Harris praised the policy, calling it a “critically important step” in improving treatment capabilities and addressing the stigma surrounding opioid use disorders.

An early sign of the Biden administration’s approach to the opioid epidemic

Activists may see this policy, which signals a willingness to focus on addiction treatment rather than criminalization, as a long-overdue step in the right direction. Speaking to NPR earlier this year about Biden’s plans to combat addiction more broadly, Kassandra Frederique of the Drug Policy Alliance claimed Biden had a “debt to pay to communities” due to his previous role in crafting policies that criminalized drug use rather than treating it as a public health concern. Most notably, Biden penned the 1994 crime bill that intensified the war on drugs.

The Biden White House released a statement outlining its year-one drug policy priorities earlier this month.