BUPRENORPHINE IN GERMANY: INCREMENTAL TREATMENT!

In the 2006 annual rreport of the travel advisory program of INDRO (Muenster, Germany) the number of patients receiving opiate agonist treatment is broken down by medication. Between 2003 and 2005 the number of methadone recipients increased slightly from 48,216 to 50,020, while the relatively few receiving codeine preparations dropped from 896 to 488. But the number receiving buprenorphine increased from 6888 to almost 10,500. It's good to see this recently introduced medication add substantially to the number of persons in treatment. Alas, in the US I'm not sure anyone is even collecting such data, and when one hears numbers related to buprenorphine "prescriptions" here it's not clear how many are for detoxification vs. maintenance (the German data are point in time, maintenance patients). Full report (in German) at www.indro-online.de