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The Methadone Train And Medication Assisted Treatment

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The Methadone Train
69,000 patients in substance abuse treatment revealed that methadone was fourth for risk of abuse out of 11 opiate based prescription drugs. Worse, after adjustment for prescriptions, methadone advanced to the number one position for abused compounds. Even more startling was a simple random population sample, surveyed by telephone, which reported methadone as the second most used drug. However, Butler et al. cite a major limitation in that the data examined came from subjects who had entered treatment for substance use disorders. Like Plater et al. (2012) aside from the telephone survey, they were unable to examine data for abusers not in treatment (2011).
Roose, Fuentes, and Cheema (2012), also take issue with the …show more content…

Drew. Their results pointed to 6 episodes over a period of 3 seasons, which make a total of 20 references to methadone, none of which were in support of methadone as a treatment option. From these six episodes, Roose et al. interpret the primary message of the entire series to be that methadone is a drug of abuse and not supported for treatment (2012). However, the fact that Roose et al. only studied one reality show means that the results are really not generalizable.
Before the study by Roose et al. (2012), however, David Frank approached the stigma concept from an entirely different perspective (2011). Frank believed in the negative perceptions of MMT mentioned by Roose et al. (2012), but pointed to long-standing twelve-step programs as the driving force behind that negativity. Frank’s study investigated this hypothesis by interviewing four individuals from each of four different types of opiate abuse categories. His categories included current heroin users not seeking any type of treatment, heroin addicts using twelve-step programs and no illicit opiates, former heroin addicts on MMT with no illicit opiate use, and former heroin addicts on MMT who also used illicit opiates. Believing that twelve-step programs promote abstinence to a point that is unproductive for addicts, Frank’s study pitted MMT, as the “medical model,” against programs like Narcotics Anonymous as the “moral-spiritual model” (2011). The medical model approaches treatment from

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