AATOD paper confronts methadone controversies.

A policy paper released this month by the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence (AATOD) focuses on some of the challenges facing opioid treatment programs (OTPs) today. For example, it cites an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine (July 5, 2018) by Michael Botticelli that promotes the idea of methadone being available in primary practice settings for the treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD) (see ADAW, July 16, 2018). "AATOD recommends that this proposal should only be considered after careful, conservative, and thoughtful evaluation," according to the policy paper. "As history and our policies have shown, we do not reject the public health model for increasing access to care for OUD, nor are we ignoring what has been learned about clinical standards of care to treat this illness. It is important to understand, however, the complexity of inducting a new patient into methadone maintenance treatment when developing policies for increasing access to medication assisted treatment." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]