illegal drugs

From France the first study to randomly allocate patients to start methadone maintenance either in primary care or at a specialist centre found primary care more attractive to patients and no less safe or effective at reducing street-opioid...

In 1960s Britain a chasm of opposing agendas and social distance opened up between doctors treating drug addiction and their patients. This cell of the Drug Treatment Matrix examines how bridging such chasms makes treatment more effective...

Effectiveness Bank Analysis: Keep Maintaining Opiate-Dependent Prisoners From the USA, a rare randomised trial found in favour of continuing methadone maintenance when patients entered prison rather than compulsory withdrawal. The potential...

Drug-based treatments dominate opiate addiction treatment but are far from universally accepted. Referring to chemical ‘solutions’ to addiction, the ‘bite’ commentary on this cell ends with the “curious possibility that precisely because a...

Trials challenge the need for the widely accepted policy of making opioid-dependent patients take their methadone or other opioid substitutes at the clinic or pharmacy, but ‘no difference’ findings may be due to the limitations of the...

Time to consolidate the lessons of the five cells in row 2 of the Drug Treatment Matrix. Whether medical or psychosocial, if you work in/with treatment, this is your chance to lift your eyes from the workbench and reconsider what it’s all...

Key studies on local systems for effectively and cost-effectively providing drug addiction treatment. Commentary focuses on payment-by-results funding mechanisms (do they impede recovery by paying for it?), crime-reduction as a...

Evaluated prevention programmes are typically implemented by research teams, raising questions over real-world applicability, but a groundbreaking US trial is said to have produced a ‘robust’ demonstration of the potential of a system in...