Recently, the SMART Recovery USA Board made a minor but important change by replacing the term “abstinence-based” with “abstinence-oriented” in describing our approach to helping people. This is because people with opioid addiction are dying from overdoses when their “abstinence-based” treatment and recovery support preclude the use of opioid agonist medications, such as methadone and buprenorphine. A large part of the U.S. treatment and recovery support world continues to regard the use of these medications as “substituting one drug for another.”
SMART strongly opposes this position because these agonists help maintain tolerance to protect people from deadly overdoses when they relapse, which is common in opioid use recovery. This position is shared by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, American Medical Association, American Society of Addiction Medicine, World Health Organization, and many other prominent authorities worldwide.
|
