treatment. joining us in our panel today are: dr. h. westley clark, u.s. department of health and human services, substance abuse and mental health services administration, center for substance abuse treatment. dr. jane maxwell, senior research professor, university of texas at austin, golf coast addiction technology transfer center; lisa mojer-torres, esquire, consumer advocate, faces & voices of recovery; mark parrino, founder and president, american association for the treatment of opiod dependence (aatod). dr. clark, let's talk a little bit about medication-assisted therapies and how they're used. well there are a number of medications that are used to help facilitate recovery from substance use disorders. the most popular and most prominent would be buprenorphine and methadone. but there are also medications used for the treatment of alcohol. examples of that would be naltrexone and the camprosate or disulfiram. what they're used to do is to either facilitate the recovery of persons through maintenance, as with methadone or buprenorphine, to facilitate detoxification. both methadone and buprenorphine can be used for that, as anti-craving agents, such as acampr

you are the director of the center for substance abuse treatment which has the oversight function for methadone and some of the other medication-assisted therapies. specifically, what does the federal ggovernment do in the oversight process? well we certify opiod treatment programs with regard to methadone used primarily. we also register or provide waivers to the controlled substances act for physicians who want to use buprenorphine. but let's focus on the accreditation process. we rely on a peer review process that's facilitated by accrediting bodies like jcaho or carve, so that they would visit clinics periodically depending upon their accreditation; either 1 year if you have a temporary accreditation or every 3 years, if you have a long-term accreditation. and they would judge the program based on clinical standards and guidelines which we promulgate and which they use to gauge what's going on at the clinic. that allows us to maintain a certain level of scrutiny on one hand, but also provides feedback to the program as to what is expected of them and how they can best provide qual