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Rolley E. Johnson, PharmD
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Baltimore, Md

Jerome H. Jaffe, MD
Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration Rockville, Md

Paul J. Fudala, PhD
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Philadelphia

JAMA. 1992;268(17):2376-2377.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.

—Dr Wiggs has used our article comparing buprenorphine with methadone as a launching pad for his view that treatment for opioid dependence is "an expensive illusion" and that the public would be better served if the money now devoted to treatment were spent instead on prison beds. Wiggs' estimate of a bed's cost ($35 000 per year) is reasonably accurate, but most of the other figures he cites to support his views are based on wild extrapolations of the costs of opioid-related crime, a misreading or misinterpretation of our article, ignorance of other work published in the area, and naiveté about the workings of the criminal justice system.

We stated explicitly in the article that, in order to focus on the effects of pharmacologic agents (and in contrast to methadone treatment programs), psychosocial components were minimized in our trial. Three other important aspects were noted that differentiated our . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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