Methadone evaluation: some additional thoughts.

This study of 460 patients showed that the 37% of the patients who were terminated as program failures did significantly worse than the active patients in terms of drug abuse, criminality, and social productivity. These findings suggest that methadone maintenance is at best a marginally effective modality for those large numbers of patients who drop out. Assuming that it is preferable for these dropouts to be on a program rather than on the streets, methadone maintenance treatment programs probably need to be more flexible so as to retain a larger number of these dropouts.