S45JUL29

TheWeekInCongress.com

Week Ending July 22, 2005

S 45 a bill to amend the Controlled Substances Act to lift the patient limitation on prescribing drug addiction treatments by medical practitioners in group practices, and for other purposes.

BRIEF

The Drug Abuse Treatment Act of 2000 limited to thirty the number of patients a group practice of physicians could treat with anti-narcotic addiction drugs such as buprenorphine/naloxone.

Patients can receive the treatment in private clinics of qualified physicians but the limit of thirty still stands.

The drug itself is proving to be highly successful in overcoming the urge to use narcotics and leaves the addict with no side affects or inabilities to work and live a normal life.

The bill would increase the number of patients a clinic of doctors could treat with the drugs.

Sponsor: Senator Carl Levin (D-MI)

Vote: Passed Senate by Unanimous Consent (July 19, 2005) Passed House 429 to 0 (RC435) (July 26, 2005)

Cost to the taxpayers: No discernible cost.

MORE INFORMATION

From the accompanying committee report-

Peter DeMarco, in an article in the May 30, 2004 Boston Globe, writes:

When buprenorphine became available as a treatment for OxyContin and heroin addiction 18 months ago, many medical professionals and addicts hailed it as a miracle drug, bringing addicts back from the brink and helping them lead normal lives when all else had failed. But for many addicts, buprenorphine remains one of the hardest drugs to obtain....... (B)prenorphine doesn't cloud the minds of patients, allowing them to work or study as if they're not on any drug at all. Nearly all who take buprenorphine, meanwhile, say they lose all physical cravings for street drugs.

But a combination of federal limits on the distribution of buprenorphine ..... has kept thousands of opiate addicts from receiving the drug in Massachusetts and across the country. At the heart of the issue is federal legislation passed in 2000--two years before the drug was approved by the FDA--that restricts individual clinical practices from treating more than 30 patients with buprenorphine at a time.

While many substance-abuse experts say the 30-patient figure is too low for some practices, their main quarrel with the Drug Addiction Treatment Act of 2000 is its failure to differentiate single-physician practices, hospitals, and health care organizations. For example, all the doctors who work for Tufts Health Plan can treat a combined 30 patients--the same total as can be seen by a physician practicing alone.

Boston health officials, along with their counterparts in the State and Federal governments, say the Federal legislation erred on the side of caution, and needs to be changed to allow wider access to buprenorphine.

``Boston Medical Center's main practice has 200 or more general internal-medicine doctors, and within that practice, we can only treat 30 people. It's the craziest loophole,'' said Colleen Labelle, nurse-manager of the hospital's Office-Based Opioid Treatment Program. ``We get 20 calls a day from

across the state. People are begging, desperate to get treated, who we can't treat.''

The bill would allow for the limit to be raised. An identical bill was passed by the Senate last year but was not considered by the House.

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