Fast, easy drug testing for buprenorphine.
Buprenorphine drug testing. Do you need drug testing that includes buprenorphine?
AMH Nationwide provides a variety of ways to test for buprenorphine depending on what time frame you are aiming to cover. Testing can be performed using a urine, hair, or nail sample.
Urine drug test
– Buprenorphine-only test
– Healthcare Professional Profile Comprehensive V
– Healthcare Professional Profile Comprehensive VI
Hair drug test – (This also includes norbuprenorphine. Testing can be segmented to capture thirty-, sixty-, and ninety-day increments of time, or longer periods of six months, nine months, one year, etc.)
– Buprenorphine-only test
– 18-panel drug test
Nail drug test – (also includes norbuprenorphine, an active metabolite of buprenorphine)
Buprenorphine is a synthetic opioid approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration as an analgesic in multiple combination forms, as well as to treat opioid addiction. It is a Schedule III controlled substance, meaning that Buprenorphine and anything containing it are regulated due to a moderate risk of physical and psychological dependence. It is designated as having the potential for abuse, taken illicitly to emulate a feeling of manufactured euphoria similar to heroin and other drugs like it. When taken in this manner, it is often done sublingually (that is, as a tablet that dissolves under the tongue), administered through the nose, or through injection. It is often obtained through legal means by opioid addiction patients from clinics or official prescriptions, and can be abused by said patients or distributed illicitly from them, among other sources.
In the present day, obtaining buprenorphine and medications including it is far easier than it was in the past. In the year 2000, Congress passed the Drug Addiction Treatment Act, requiring medical professionals to obtain a special certification called an “X waiver” as a prerequisite for prescribing buprenorphine for outpatient use to treat opioid addiction. This waiver originally required practitioners to undergo specialized training in order to receive it, until the year 2021 when restrictions were loosened and licensed professionals could simply obtain the waiver itself without further prerequisite. However, under these new regulations treatment had to be limited to no more than thirty buprenorphine patients per practitioner. This standard lasted until December 29, 2022, when the Consolidated Appropriations Act was signed into effect to do away with the waiver and the patient limit altogether. The following month, official guidelines were laid out by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for the implementation of the now-current regulations, in which any practitioner with a standard DEA registration number may prescribe buprenorphine to as many patients as they feel would be necessary. This has led to an increased number of opioid treatment patients gaining access to the drug and its combination forms, unfortunately leading to an increased number of abuse cases alongside it.
As the populations of people vulnerable to buprenorphine abuse invariably increase, the need for buprenorphine drug testing increases as well. Those who are addicted to drugs like heroin or who have previously abused narcotic substances, naive young people who do not know the effects of buprenorphine, and previous or current opioid treatment patients are all groups at risk of developing a dependency on buprenorphine and similar substances. Among these substances, buprenorphine is a common drug of abuse due to its long-lasting analgesic effects, often enduring for twenty-four to seventy-two hours, and at twenty to thirty times the strength of morphine. In addition, buprenorphine usually produces less severe respiratory depression than other narcotics, even at high doses, adding to its popularity–although it should be mentioned that when taken in combination with benzodiazepines the reverse effect occurs, often leading to overdose and/or death. Other side effects that can also occur include nausea, vomiting, dizziness, fever, tremors, muscle cramps, and adrenal insufficiency. If you or someone you know are concerned about the possibility of buprenorphine dependency, addiction, or overdose, then consider laboratory testing to track and quantify the drug’s presence in the body.
To order a drug test simply call a customer service specialist. We can discuss what type of testing is right for you and send you a lab order all in one quick conversation.