Re “Treating drug addiction with drugs’’ (Page A1, June 7): I am grateful to Felice Freyer for quoting a physician suggesting that a life in recovery when taking buprenorphine “is not a life worth living.’’ I read that passage with my patients the other day, and shared anger, gratitude, and tears, all reaffirming the gift of life, along with all its challenges, that they have achieved with, yes, daily buprenorphine.

One woman in her 40s, on her lunch break, had just proudly relayed the praise her supervisors had given her as a manager in a downtown firm. For years she had battled an opioid use disorder.

Another, a 35-year-old, had just shared selfies from the morning, him wearing an orange hardhat, atop a building where he works. His son had been born almost three years ago, when that man, my patient, was in a coma. The day before, he had just been approved for a mortgage and made a bid on a house — firsts for him. As I read aloud the physician’s dismissive, repugnant words from the article, he began to weep, and acknowledged how close he has come to never having the feeling of his son hugging his leg.

These lives are worth living.

Dr. Michael F. Bierer

Boston

The writer, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, is president of the Massachusetts Society of Addiction Medicine.