the study, prescription rates are just pretty abysmal generally,” says Christine Khaikin, a senior health policy attorney for the Legal Action Center, an advocacy group for building health equity.
The rates were similarly low for naloxone – 23 percent for whites, 21 percent for Hispanics and 14 percent for Blacks.
Buprenorphine prescription rates could have been dampened by regulations that at the time restricted who could prescribe the treatment drug, Barnett noted. Those restrictions were recently lifted.
But for naloxone, “which has no such restrictions at all, we saw basically disparities of the exact same magnitude,” Barnett said. “There’s no reason why clinicians shouldn’t be prescribing this medication to people with overdoses, yet we saw a huge gap between white and Black.”
“And not only that, even though there’s a big gap between white and Black, the overall rates of people receiving any buprenorphine or naloxone were extremely low,” Barnett added.
What’s worse, patients identified with opioid addiction were more likely to be prescribed benzodiazepines — drugs typically used to treat anxiety that can dramatically increase risk of overdose when used with opioids.
About 37 percent of whites, 30 percent of Hispanics and 23 percent of Blacks were prescribed benzodiazepines within six months of an opioid-related health event, results show.
Researchers ruled out regional differences and patients’ access to medical care as potential explanations for the health inequities they uncovered, Barnett says.
“What we found here was that, as you would expect in a fairly sick population of folks with disability, white, Black and Hispanic patients were