ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the best-practice approaches that are currently advocated for addiction treatment. This reflects the fact that challenges of treatment are the primary focus of current approaches to understanding addiction. Pharmacotherapy was first introduced by Vincent Dole and Marie Nyswander in New York in the early 1960s and involved prescribing the synthetic opioid methadone. Their model of Methadone Maintenance Treatment (MMT) prescribed high doses of methadone to be taken by mouth rather than injected. In light of these and other limitations of MMT, there have been attempts to develop new forms of opiate pharmacotherapy. Naltrexone is another type of pharmacotherapy that acts in a different way to the aforementioned drugs. Behavioural couples therapy (BCT) for alcoholism and drug abuse involves the partner of the person with an alcohol or other drug problem in all aspects of treatment.
