So we’ve spent the past week or so talking about drug laws and criminal charges and sort of exploring the laws themselves and what they mean for us, and today we’re going to talk about opiate addiction treatment laws specifically.

The Drug Addiction Treatment Act of 2000

In 2000, the Federal government passed The Drug Addiction Treatment Act of 2000. This landmark law allowed qualified physicians to prescribe and dispense narcotics – in particular, Suboxone – to their patients for the purpose of treating dependency on opiates. (Suboxone is a drug that is used only for the treatment of opiate addiction.) This was a dramatic shift, for previously, this treatment could only take place in drug treatment centers. The law allowed physicians to dispense Suboxone treatments in the privacy of their own practice, which was a boon for patients who didn’t want the stigma attached with going to a treatment center.

The Catch
 
Of course, this law wasn’t without a catch. There was a limit of 30 patients placed on the number of people that could be treated per practice. So, regardless of how many qualified physicians were employed by a particular practice, the maximum number of patients that practice could treat was thirty. This was the major disadvantage to the 2000 law, but it was still a leap forward for opiate treatment.

The Catch is Uncaught
 
Then, in 2005, public law 109-56 was passed. This law was an amendment to The Drug Addiction Treatment Act of 2000, and removed the 30 patient limit on medical practices. The limit was still imposed on individual physicians, but it was lifted for medical practices as a whole. Because of this change, practices with more than one doctor had the ability to treat more than 30 patients at a time.
 
Finally, in 2006, another law was created that allowed certified physicians to prescribe Suboxone to treat up to 100 patients at a time, a huge jump from the previous limit of 30 patients. In order to do this, the physician would have to submit an “intent” notification to the department of Health and Human Services. This law provided a huge boost to help doctors treat patients since they were no longer shackled by such a low patient limit.
 
What’s your opinion on this patient limit? Should they deregulate methadone in the same way?

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"Opiate Addiction Treatment in the United States" posted in Outpatient treatment, Suboxone Treatment, opiate-detox.
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