• Posted September 3, 2025

It's Still Tough to Find a Key Anti-Opioid Treatment at U.S. Pharmacies

One of the most effective medications for treating opioid addiction is still hard to find at U.S. pharmacies, according to a new study.

Only 2 in 5 retail pharmacies carried buprenorphine in 2023, researchers reported Sept. 2 in the journal Health Affairs.

And pharmacies in minority neighborhoods are even less likely to have buprenorphine on hand, results showed.

This lack of availability remains despite efforts to increase access to buprenorphine, researchers noted.

“Relaxing buprenorphine prescribing rules was an important step in making this critical treatment more accessible, but too many patients lack a nearby pharmacy that carries it,” senior researcher Dima Mazen Qato of the USC Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences said in a news release.

Buprenorphine works by attaching to a person’s opioid receptors, reducing their cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Because it’s an opioid itself, buprenorphine is a schedule III controlled drug.

Efforts have focused on making it easier to prescribe, including the 2023 elimination of rules that required doctors to receive specialized training and registration before they could hand out buprenorphine scrips, researchers said.

To see whether that has moved the needle, researchers analyzed buprenorphine claims logged between 2017 and 2023 in a database that covers 93% of U.S. retail prescription claims.

Results showed that buprenorphine was available at only 39% of U.S. pharmacies in 2023, up from 33% in 2017.

Overall, buprenorphine availability increased in most states, but significantly declined in five states – Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, Washington and Virginia – as well as in Washington, D.C.

Black (18%) and Latino (17%) neighborhood pharmacies were significantly less likely to carry buprenorphine than those in white neighborhoods (46%), researchers found.

In some states like California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, buprenorphine availability in minority neighborhoods was four to five times lower than in white neighborhoods, results showed.

Rural counties were persistently more likely to carry buprenorphine, as well as counties with high rates of opioid overdose deaths.

But in 73 hard-hit rural counties, less than 25% of pharmacies carried buprenorphine, and another 25 counties lacked a pharmacy altogether.

Researchers said these results show that regulations aimed at preventing opioid abuse might inadvertently be discouraging pharmacies from carrying buprenorphine.

When buprenorphine demand rises, suppliers might delay or pause shipments to avoid scrutiny from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), researchers said.

Likewise, worries about DEA action cause some pharmacies to refuse to dispense buprenorphine altogether, while others fret over running afoul of federal and state pharmacy regulations and laws, researchers said.

Buprenorphine availability was highest in states with the least restrictive prescription drug monitoring programs, including those that limited how law enforcement could access the databases to investigate suspicious prescribing, results showed.

“Federal and state policymakers must reduce barriers that make it difficult for pharmacies to stock buprenorphine, especially in some of the more vulnerable communities,” Qato said.

State and local governments also might consider requiring pharmacies to stock buprenorphine, similar to orders that have required the OD reversal drug naloxone be available, researchers said.

“If policymakers fail to introduce policies that increase equitable access to buprenorphine at local pharmacies, existing racial and ethnic disparities in opioid use disorder treatment and recovery will likely worsen,” lead researcher Jenny Guadamuz, an assistant professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Public Health, said in a news release.

More information

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has more on buprenorphine.

SOURCE: University of Southern California, news release, Sept. 2, 2025