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    For Health Workers Struggling With Addiction, Why Are Treatment Options Limited?

    Doctors and nurses are often barred from turning to FDA-approved medications that research shows to be the most effective way to quit. Critics of that policy say stigma is undermining best practice
    by Selena Simmons-Duffin Sep 06, 2019 6 minutes
    Dr. Peter Grinspoon was a practicing physician when he became addicted to opioids. When he got caught, Grinspoon wasn't allowed access to what's now the standard treatment for addiction — buprenorphine or methadone (in addition to counseling) — precisely because he was a doctor.

    Peter Grinspoon got addicted to Vicodin in medical school, and still had an opioid addiction five years into practice as a primary care physician.

    Then, in February 2005, he got caught.

    "In my addicted mindframe, I was writing prescriptions for a nanny who had since returned back to another country," he says. "It didn't take the pharmacist long to figure out that I was not a 19-year-old nanny from New Zealand."

    One day, during lunch, the state police and the DEA showed up at his medical office in Boston.

    "I start going all, 'I'm glad you're here. How can I help you?' " he says. "And they're like, 'Doc, cut the crap. We know you're writing bad scripts.' "

    He was fingerprinted the next day and charged with three felony counts of fraudulently obtaining a controlled substance.

    He also was immediately referred to a , one of the state-run specialty treatment programs developed in the 1970s by physicians to help fellow physicians beat addiction. Known to doctors as PHPs, these programs now cover other sorts of health

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