The Moral Panic Over Ozempic Misses the Point

In 2002, the FDA approved Suboxone, a new medication to treat opioid use disorder. Suboxone is a compound of two drugs that decreases one’s cravings for opioids while blocking their effects. It is safer and less cumbersome than methadone, which requires daily or weekly visits to a clinic, and more effective than any abstinence-based treatment, which requires people to withstand cravings and suppress physical discomfort. In clinical trials, Suboxone was shown to help opioid users avoid jail time and to decrease their mortality by over 50 percent. “You’d think that anything that can help save a heroin addict’s life would be seen as a good thing,” the writer and academic Michael Clune wrote in 2014, a year that marked an inflection point in an epidemic of fentanyl-related deaths. “So why, then, when I touted Suboxone at an Narcotics Anonymous meeting with a bunch of regulars did they look at me as if I’d gone insane?”

Clune has a history of heroin addiction (he wrote, to my mind, one of the great heroin-addiction memoirs) but successfully wrestled his demons into submission through a stay in rehab, diligent attendance at Narcotics Anonymous, exercise, and an enigmatic, epiphanic experience of grace. He knows how lucky he is to have overcome his addiction through struggle and also knows how rarely his strategy works for others. But when he proposed to friends in the recovery community that Suboxone is a worthy tool, they were upset; they were skeptical of a fix so expedient, so simple, so biological. “That’s like telling someone that smoking crack will get their mind off booze,” one NA longtimer argued. “Your recovery is based on a spiritual awakening,” another explained to Clune angrily. To this friend, Suboxone — a magic pill that changes the brain — would foreclose a person’s chance of personal transformation.

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