Is Suboxone Potent?

We get about 5000 readers of SuboxForum per day who ask question, provide answers, or share their experiences with buprenorphine medications. If you’re a patient on buprenorphine, consider joining us. It is free, and you’ll find help for starting buprenorphine, tapering off the medication, and everything in between.  Or if you’re a buprenorphine prescriber consider joining to see what patients are doing and thinking, and to help answer their questions! Yesterday someone wrote about the high potency of buprenorphine. He also wrote that it is hard to get off buprenorphine medications. I ended up writing more than I intended, which occurs often and keeps me up too late most evenings. I decided to share my anwer, as the issue comes up often on the forum and in my practice treating patients on buprenorphine medications (Suboxone, buprenorphine, Zubsolv, Bunavail, etc.) My answer, partially edited: Yes, buprenorphine is ‘potent’, but that potency is limited. Buprenorphine has strong opioid effects in microgram amounts, which is one aspect of potency. But the potency of buprenorphine is limited to a certain maximum effect, and in that regard buprenorphine is not potent at all. No matter how many milligrams, grams, or pounds of buprenorphine a person ingests, injects, or absorbs sublingually, the medication is NOT more potent than one 80 mg tablet of Oxycontin or five 10 mg tablets of methadone. Likewise, an adult human cannot typically overdose on bupr...
Source: Suboxone Talk Zone - Category: Addiction Authors: Tags: Addiction Source Type: blogs