Can Naltrexone Be Taken In Place Of Suboxone For Heroin Addiction?

Posted on Thu, 15 Dec 2016

Question: I have a friend who is a heroin addict. She would like to get on sobocksan. It seems to be a difficult prescription to get. I would like to know how or what you would suggest to get a prescription. Also I was told that Naltrexone is a similar drug for opiod addiction. what are the differences in these medications

Answered by Dr. Dr. Matt Wachsman (1 hour later)

Brief Answer:
Good qustions.

Detailed Answer:
Suboxone is a combination of two drugs, one (buprenorphine) is a narcotic that is somewhat weak and has a maximal effect of about 150 mg of oxycodone no matter how much you take. Overdoses with it are therefore quite hard to do! And it has a narcotic blocker with it that prevents taking other narcotics and having them do anything.

Naltrexone is a plain blocker of narcotics. Any narcotics taken after it is there, get blocked from doing anything.

BOTH will produce withdrawal if someone is already on narcotics and high. Neither will if someone is quite clear of narcotics.

Suboxone requires a specific license to prescribe that can be difficult and expensive and one is limited to a quite small number of patients until one is proven to be a reliable phsyciain.

Listings of physisicna with the license can be found here:
http://www.suboxone-directory.com/

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Above answer was peer-reviewed by : Dr. Chakravarthy Mazumdar