Physician-prescribed buprenorphine is providing new hope for opiate addicts whose recovery was blocked by lack of access to treatment, USA Today reported Jan. 23.

David Alexander, 56, who became addicted to prescription painkillers after a motorcycle crash, said the opiate-replacement medication "saved my life." Unlike methadone, which can only be dispensed at clinics, bupe users can get a prescription from their doctor and fill it at a local pharmacy.

Bupe is becoming the treatment of choice for a new generation of opiate addicts -- not street junkies addicted to heroin, but rather middle Americans addicted to opiate-based painkillers. "People who would never come into a methadone clinic, because it is both degrading and stigmatized, will come to a private physician's office. They could have a cold for all anybody knows," says Charles Schuster, head of the Substance Abuse Clinical Research Division at Wayne State University.

A recent study found that bupe patients were three times more likely to work full-time than methadone patients, and many had never even tried methadone treatment. "The results suggest that office-based treatment of opioid dependence is associated with new types of patients entering into treatment," Yale University researchers David Fiellin and Lynn Sullivan said.

Lauren Nugent, 36, never took drugs as an adolescent but become addicted to physician-prescribed Percoset and Vicodin in her late 20s. Stints in treatment didn't work, but Nugent began taking bupe after getting a prescription from Waterbury, Conn., based addiction specialist Mark Kraus in 2004. "I have absolutely no thoughts of going back to drugs," said Nugent. "At one point, I had taken methadone to try to get my life back. It was just like another drug for me. With the buprenorphine, I feel like a whole, normal person."

Currently, about 6,900 doctors have been federally certified to prescribe bupe, including psychiatrists and family practitioners like Scott Prince of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., who says some of his colleagues are "afraid of that type of patient being in their office, but they don't understand. That type of patient is in their office already."

Bupe doses prescribed in the U.S. have risen from 1.9 million in 2003 to 14.9 million in the first eight months of 2005. Little abuse or diversion of the drug has been seen.