Not to mention, that seems like a pretty horrible and bleak outlook to make people believe they can't make a full recovery without being medicated for the rest of their life.
Again, I've known many people who have taken these drugs and a large number of them relapse bad. In fact, from what I hear the withdrawl from suboxone is 10x worse than from heroin.
[1] Xanax has a lot of problems with long term use though, so Xanax, specifically, would likely not be a good candidate.
My MIL replaced alcohol and cocaine addictions with a coffee addiction. It's been over a decade and she doesn't seem to have any significant negative outcomes with the coffee and coffee is cheap and readily available almost everywhere. From what I see, I believe the coffee is more of a psychological crutch for her - but it's not harming her.
That's some pretty scary data. Half the death rate... that's a very significant number.
> You're advocating to stay on a drug the rest of your life?
Why not? It saves lives (hello insulin). And here's a telling bit from the article:
> When patients take a stable, regular and appropriate dose, maintenance medications don’t cause impairment, and the patient can work, love and drive. In essence, what maintenance does is replace addiction — which, remember, is defined as compulsive use despite consequences — with physiological dependence, which, as noted above, is not harmful in and of itself.
Here's the link with much more info about buprenorphine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293937/
Certainly it would be nice to have an effective solution that didn't require daily use... but we don't. What we have is a safe drug that cuts the death rate by half.