There are many options for people who are addicted to opiate based drugs, and one of those options is Suboxone treatment.  Opiate drugs include painkillers such as prescription medications such as Vicodin, but also some street drugs such as heroin.  People who get addicted to opiates have a very hard time stopping their use of the drug, because the physical withdrawal symptoms are so uncomfortable.

Suboxone is actually a medicine that was developed to help treat opiate withdrawal, but it can also be used for long term drug maintenance in the opiate addict.  There are actually two medications in each pill of Suboxone, one is a synthetic partial opiate and the other is an opiate blocker.  They put the opiate blocker into the medicine so that people can not melt the pill down and inject it, thus abusing it.

The fact that it is a partial opiate rather than a full opiate makes a big difference.  Full opiates are the drugs that people get addicted to and can produce a powerful high, even causing people to nod out when they use a lot of the drug.  But the partial opiate in Suboxone is not this powerful, and does not produce as much of a euphoric effect.  The drug is designed to fill the opiate receptors in the brain and bring relief, rather than to flood the system and induce a drunken stupor of complete euphoria.

As a method of opiate addiction treatment, Suboxone can be very expensive in the long run.  But this is not always an issue for opiate addicts because most of them were spending even more money on their favorite opiate drug before they got clean.  So the cost can be mitigated by the fact that they are no longer abusing drugs.

Some people do not think that it makes sense to treat drug addicts with pills, but in some cases, addicts have had great success with this particular medication in helping them to stay clean.