Researchers who interviewed 20 drug users in Allegheny and Dauphin Counties for a paper published in the International Journal of Drug Policy last year found that nearly all of the study’s participants did not use the drug to achieve a pleasurable high. Instead, they had bought buprenorphine off the street to get through withdrawal when heroin was unavailable — or when they didn’t want to use heroin. A “significant minority” of the participants had bought buprenorphine to try to wean themselves off other opioids, the paper found.