New Clinical Implications of Opiate Maintenance Treatments

Opiate addiction is a chronic mental illness with se- vere repercussion in personal and public health. Various medicaments have been subjected to research in order to find a proper treatment, methadone is the most and wide used drug, buprenorphine/naloxone is the most recent ones, but other choices have been proposed such as prescribing heroin (1). The mentioned treatments, are considered as maintenance ones, because, the chronic illnesses need a longtime approach. Other possibilities have been studied, for example the detoxification (con- ventional or ultra-rapid) as well as the use of opiate an- tagonist as naltrexone. On the other hand, a long period of dis habituation or relapse prevention is required after detoxification of all sorts of addictions, including opiate dependency.