New drug treatment to stop abuse

Star: KUALA LUMPUR: The drug substitution therapy (DST) administered by private doctors will soon adopt a new medication to curb abuse by drug addicts.
Some drug addicts have been found to abuse the treatment by mixing the prescription of buprenorphine with tranquillisers to get “high”.
A new drug combination of buprenorphine/ naloxone in a single tablet will give the drug addicts an undesired effect instead – similar to the “cold turkey” effect – when mixed with tranquillisers or benzodiazepines such as valium.
Federation of Private Medical Practitioners’ Association of Malaysia (FPMPAM) president Dr Steven Chow said that the introduction of the drug in Malaysia was one of the efforts taken to prevent abuse of the treatment.
It has been discovered that patients are injecting a cocktail of prescribed medications to get high.
“Doctor hopping” is a ruse used by some addicts who pose as patients while visiting several clinics to obtain the prescribed medication and channel them into the black market.
Dr Chow said such abuse had led Singapore to reclassify buprenorphine as a Class A controlled drug, placing it in the same category as other illicit agents regulated under its penal code and making it virtually unavailable for community-based treatment by family practitioners.
“We do not want to come to this situation and end up preventing drug addicts from obtaining therapy,” he said at the federation’s National Drug Substitution Treatment workshop yesterday.
The new drug combination will replace buprenorphine.
There are at present 350 general practitioners and family doctors treating 10,000 addicts on buprenorphine since the federation launched its “Doctors Who Care” programme in 2001.
A total of 1,500 addicts is on methadone treatment under the Government’s DST programme.
Those addicted to opiates such as heroin, morphine and opium are treated with buprenorphine and methadone to manage a severe withdrawal effect from drug use.
Yesterday, Health Ministry director-general Tan Sri Dr Ismail Merican launched the National DST Guidelines and DST Registry in collaboration with FPMPAM, which aimed at improving the quality of the DST programmes and tightening regulatory control of the medications prescribed.
The DST Registry, which is a real-time web-based data system, is to keep a record of prescribing doctors and their patients to detect and curb the abuse of the treatment.
Dr Ismail said that doctors who wanted to participate in the DST (using the new drug) would now have to register themselves at the registry to be vetted by the ministry.
“Although abuse among doctors is not a serious problem, we will be selective because we don’t want any errant doctors.
“When they register we can detect those who have been abusing the medication and we will remove them from the programme.
“We hope that by February the online list of doctors who can participate in the programme will be ready,” he added.