Pharmacotherapies for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence

The most comprehensive text of its kind, this book addresses both the management of opioid withdrawal and opioid maintenance therapy, and combines up-to-date reviews of the scientific literature with evidence-based clinical guidelines for all of the relevant pharmacotherapies.

A unique work, Pharmacotherapies for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence presents:

· detailed information on the cost-effectiveness of the various types of opioid treatment

· the range of pharmacotherapies used for the management of opioid dependence

· the state of knowledge from the international research literature on the value and relative efficacy of the various pharmacological approaches.

This includes pharmacotherapies used in the management of withdrawal from opioids such as clonidine, lofexidine, methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone and also symptomatic medications. It also includes different forms of maintenance therapy using opioid agonists such as methadone, LAAM, buprenorphine, slow-release oral morphine and diamorphine, and opioid antagonists such as naltrexone.

This text should appeal to researchers, to identify gaps in the research literature and provide a basis for determining appropriate research directions, to clinicians by providing clinical with clinical guidelines and information concerning the empirical basis for the treatments, and to policy makers in assisting them to make decisions about the various treatments from a public health perspective, taking into account the relative cost and effectiveness of the interventions.