Black patients and women in the US are far less likely to receive medication to manage opioid abuse, according to research that shows how unequal access is to the life-saving treatments.
(Bloomberg) — Black patients and women in the US are far less likely to receive medication to manage opioid abuse, according to research that shows how unequal access is to the life-saving treatments.
White adults were 14 times more likely to receive medicine to combat opioid use disorder than Black adults, according to research released Monday in the JAMA Network Open medical journal. Meanwhile, men had six times the likelihood as women of getting access to drugs such as buprenorphine.
Overall, just one in five adults who abused opioids in the past year received medications that reduce cravings and overdoses. People who are unemployed or live in rural parts of the US also had a harder time gaining access.
The US is in the midst of what is often called an opioid epidemic, with an estimated three million people abusing the drugs through prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl. There were more than 80,000 deaths linked to opioids in 2021.
Racial disparities extend to the toll of opioid overdoses as well. Black people 15-to-24 years old experienced the largest increase in the rate of overdose deaths from 2019 to 2020, a spike of more than 80%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We have a lot of work to do to both encourage people to use this treatment and, when they don’t have access, to change that in important ways,” said Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and senior author of the study.
Lack of Access
One hurdle is that many facilities don’t offer the treatments, which also include methadone and naltrexone. Before this year, most drugs that combat opioid abuse could only be prescribed by a specialty-trained physician under the Drug Addiction Treatment Act of 2000. But congress changed the law this year to broaden distribution.
Programs such as mobile methadone clinics have also improved access by bringing treatment directly to patients, Compton said. The researchers found that people who received telehealth treatments for substance abuse were more likely to receive medications, opening another door to make them more widely available.
In another move to boost access, the Food and Drug Administration this year approved over-the-counter Naloxone nasal sprays that can be used to treat overdoses.
Overdosing on opioids is “a totally preventable death,” Compton said. “That’s the disturbing part to me, as a public health official, is that we could save every single life if the antidote is available.”
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