Overdose Deaths are Declining: How Have Medications for Opioid Use Disorder Helped?

DPA: What are medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD)? How are they helping? What are barriers to people getting them?

Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta: Medications for opioid use disorder, like methadone and buprenorphine, really help people get back on their feet.

Medications like methadone and buprenorphine cut overdose risk by half, but the barriers to get them are still too high. Medications can help reduce overdose risk at the individual level, and if we scale that up, it translates to helping at the population level.

The barriers to getting treatment include cost, not having a pharmacy or a doctor who can prescribe it to you, or maybe you’re like the 80% of counties in the United States where there’s no methadone access at all.

If we want overdose deaths to continue to decline in the United States, we need to rapidly expand drug treatment. That drug treatment needs to be cheap and available everywhere. We need to renew our focus on the people who are actually dying from overdose.

Return to the main question page to hear more from Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta about what we can learn from declining overdose death rates. 

About Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta: Dr. Dasgupta is a senior scientist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He has been studying drug overdose deaths for over 20 years.