The research team conducted a doctrinal legal analysis combined with a normative-comparative approach, examining the national legislation of nine EU Member States—Belgium, Poland, Greece, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal—together with the United Kingdom, which was included because of its historically influential role in European pharmaceutical regulation despite its post-Brexit status. The frameworks reflected the law as it stood on 1 February 2026, drawing on primary legal texts retrieved from official national databases such as Légifrance, Gesetze im Internet, Normattiva, ISAP and legislation.gov.uk, alongside guidance from national regulators and reports from the European Union Drugs Agency. Three authors independently extracted data using a standardized form structured around seven criteria: legal classification, prescribing regime, physical storage, accountability systems, digitalization, destruction procedures and institutional oversight.

The jurisdictions were deliberately chosen to represent the full range of regulatory orientations found in European literature and in country assessments by the International Narcotics Control Board, covering Northern, Western, Southern and Eastern Europe. A country was assigned to a regulatory model when it exhibited the defining features of that model for at least five of the seven criteria, with no directly contradictory features among the remainder. Dual assignment was permitted where a jurisdiction displayed balanced features of two models, as occurred with Ireland. The typology had been formulated as an a priori scaffold from comparative pharmaceutical law scholarship and the INCB assessment framework, and the empirical verification stage confirmed rather than redefined it.

Four models emerged. The first, labeled Centralized-Procedural, groups France, Germany, Italy and Greece. It is characterized by detailed procedural regulation, centralized licensing, specialized prescription forms—notably the triplicate Betäubungsmittelrezepte in Germany and the numbered ricette ministeriali a ricalco in Italy—and strong administrative accountability through pharmaceutical oversight. Its strength lies in high traceability and clearly defined responsibilities; its weakness is a substantial administrative burden and limited flexibility. The second model, Digitalized-Integrated, covers Belgium and Poland, both of which have made electronic systems mandatory at national level: Poland introduced compulsory e-prescriptions for all I-N narcotic and II-P psychotropic drugs on 1 November 2023, after which paper prescriptions became invalid, while Belgium’s Narcoreg platform, mandatory since 1 September 2023, requires business-to-business transfers to be declared within 30 days.

The third, Harm-Reduction model, encompasses the Netherlands and Portugal. Both distinguish sharply between strict medical control of therapeutic use and a public-health-oriented social policy toward users. Portugal is the boldest case: Law 30/2000 decriminalizes possession of personal-use amounts of all controlled substances, up to a ten-day supply, shifting the response from criminal prosecution to administrative and health regulation, while medical use remains strictly controlled under Decreto-Lei 15/93. Evidence reviewed in the study indicates that Portuguese decriminalization, combined with investment in prevention and treatment, did not increase problematic drug use and was associated with improvements in public health indicators, although the model’s sustainability remains debated as patterns of substance use diversify. The Netherlands pairs its two-list Opiumwet system with digital registers in pharmacies and permits for hospital pharmacies issued by the Ministry of Health.

The fourth model, Institutional Accountability, is anchored in the United Kingdom and, jointly, Ireland. Its distinctive feature is the Controlled Drugs Accountable Officer, a designated individual required in every UK organization handling controlled medicines, responsible for standard operating procedures, internal audits and reporting to NHS England and the Care Quality Commission. No equivalent mandatory position exists elsewhere in Europe. Ireland shares the procedural features of the centralized model—bound Controlled Drugs Registers, safe-custody storage rules and supervised destruction—but also provides a designated internal responsible officer analogous to the CDAO, earning it dual placement in Models 1 and 4.

The quantitative contrasts the study documents are striking. Document retention requirements range from two to ten years, with France imposing the longest period: ten years for the narcotics register and destruction records, and three years for prescription copies. Portugal and Poland require five-year retention. Digitalization, operationalized as mandatory electronic use for prescription issuance, dispensing records or business-to-business reporting, was rated high in the Netherlands, Poland and Belgium; intermediate in Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom, where the Electronic Prescription Service covers some Schedule 3 to 5 drugs but Schedule 2 medicines still demand paper FP10PCD forms; and low in France, Germany, Portugal and Ireland, all of which still rely predominantly on paper-based tracking. Germany’s famous yellow triplicate forms, one copy each for prescriber, pharmacy and audit, remain entirely paper-based.

Even emergency provision splits the continent. Ireland permits pharmacists to make emergency supplies of CD2, CD3 and CD4 substances—up to five days of treatment or the minimum pack size—when they judge the supply safe, appropriate and necessary. The United Kingdom takes nearly the opposite position: emergency supply of Schedule 2 and most Schedule 3 drugs is effectively prohibited, with phenobarbital for epilepsy the sole exception. Destruction procedures diverge just as widely, from Belgium’s FAMHP-supervised sealing and three-copy destruction statements, through Poland’s documented transfer to licensed companies and Greece’s annual witnessed destruction events, to the pharmacist-led denaturing performed in French hospitals in the presence of a second pharmacist.

The fragmentation has tangible clinical consequences. The EU’s cross-border electronic prescription infrastructure, eHDSI or MyHealth@EU, currently excludes controlled substances altogether, so regulatory divergence directly disrupts continuity of care for patients with legitimate therapeutic needs who travel within the Union—a growing problem as patient and professional mobility increases. The study’s authors argue that harmonization should not mean uniformity, which they consider both unrealistic and undesirable, but rather the definition of minimum common standards for traceability, destruction documentation and digitalization thresholds, while preserving room for national adaptation. They also call for explicit recognition of hospital pharmacists, whom they describe as the critical legal-clinical interface between regulatory frameworks and daily practice.

From a hospital pharmacy perspective, the findings carry direct operational weight. In the low-digitalization countries, pharmacists shoulder manual paper-based verification, register maintenance and destruction documentation, tasks that consume time and raise the risk of transcription errors and accountability gaps; the Belgian and Polish digital models offer a route to reducing that burden while strengthening traceability. Scoping review evidence cited in the study confirms that inadequate safeguards in hospital controlled substance management are associated with drug diversion, with pharmacy playing a central role in both prevention and detection. The authors acknowledge limitations: the analysis examines codified law rather than implementation or clinical outcomes, uses purposive rather than statistically representative sampling, and involves interpretive judgment in borderline model assignments. Future research, they suggest, could evaluate the real-world effectiveness of each model, explore healthcare professionals’ experiences, analyze incident frequency across systems and assess whether artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies could further enhance traceability and security in this most tightly guarded corner of pharmaceutical practice.

Subject of Research: Comparative national regulation of medicinal products containing controlled substances in nine EU Member States and the United Kingdom

Article Title: Comparative analysis of national regulatory frameworks for medicinal products containing controlled substances in nine selected EU Member States and the United Kingdom

Article References: Stoyanova, D. D., Todorova, A. H., Pesheva, M. T., & Grigorov, E. E. (2026). Comparative analysis of national regulatory frameworks for medicinal products containing controlled substances in nine selected EU Member States and the United Kingdom. Pharmacia, 73, Article e197283. https://doi.org/10.3897/pharmacia.73.e197283

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/pharmacia.73.e197283

Keywords: controlled substances, pharmaceutical regulation, opioids, European Union, hospital pharmacy, digitalization, e-prescription, harm reduction, drug policy, regulatory harmonization, United Kingdom, misuse of drugs

Oregon became the first state to legalize regulated, supervised psilocybin use in 2023, opening the door to a treatment built around the psychoactive compound found in so-called magic mushrooms. Since then, people experiencing depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and substance use disorders have sought out the state’s licensed centers, drawn in part by clinical trial evidence suggesting that psilocybin, when combined with psychological support or psychotherapy, can produce meaningful relief for some patients. The drug remains illegal under federal law, which has made Oregon’s state-level regulatory experiment a singular case study in how psychedelic services might be delivered at scale. Until this new work, however, almost nothing was known about what prospective clients actually encounter when they contact a center, or what safeguards operate in real-world conditions rather than controlled trial settings.

To answer that question, the research team adopted a mystery shopper design, a method long used in health services research to evaluate how systems treat real patients. Three co-authors made scripted phone calls posing as potential clients who described depression along with either a personal history of alcohol use disorder or a family history of psychosis, details chosen because they are clinically relevant risk factors that responsible providers should probe. The callers documented whether staff asked about medications, suicidal ideation and psychiatric history, all of which are required elements of Oregon’s legal framework for psilocybin services. They also recorded the prices quoted for treatment. Of Oregon’s 22 active centers at the time, the team successfully reached 15 by phone, providing a substantial sample of the state’s operating facilities.

The results were striking in their consistency. No center allowed unsupervised or take-home use of psilocybin, a finding that directly counters fears that the state’s model might function like a retail dispensary. Staff at every center routinely asked about psychiatric history, current medications and contraindications before discussing next steps, and nearly every center flagged psychoactive medications that should not be combined with psilocybin. Critically, no center advised callers taking antidepressants to stop their medication without first consulting their primary care physician, a safeguard with real clinical importance given the risks of abrupt discontinuation and the pharmacological interactions that can complicate psychedelic therapy.

From a pharmacological standpoint, that caution is well founded. Psilocybin is a prodrug that is converted in the body to psilocin, which acts primarily as an agonist at the serotonin 2A receptor, the molecular trigger for the drug’s characteristic alterations in perception, mood and cognition. Combining psilocybin with certain psychiatric medications, particularly serotonergic drugs, can blunt or complicate its effects, and stopping antidepressants abruptly carries its own hazards, including discontinuation symptoms and relapse risk. The fact that facilitators consistently deferred medication decisions to prescribing physicians suggests that the state’s training and regulatory requirements are translating into behavior that aligns with mainstream psychiatric practice, not just psychedelic subculture norms.

The qualitative texture of the interactions impressed the researchers as much as the checklist compliance. Co-senior author Leopoldo J. Cabassa, a professor at Washington University’s Brown School who co-directs the university’s Center for Mental Health Services Research, described the calls as thoughtful conversations in which facilitators engaged callers, asked good questions and worked to gather as much information as possible before recommending services. In his telling, facilitators pushed past a simple checklist to genuinely understand a caller’s history. Co-senior author Kevin Xu, an assistant professor of psychiatry at WashU Medicine, admitted that the team had wondered going in whether Oregon’s model might operate like a dispensary in practice, allowing someone to call a center, pick up psilocybin and take it home with little screening along the way. Instead, he was surprised by how detailed the questions about mental health and risk factors turned out to be, and, he noted, by how expensive the services were.

That expense emerged as the study’s central caveat. The median cost of a supervised psilocybin session was $1,900, and not a single center accepted insurance, a combination that places treatment far beyond the reach of many Americans who might benefit from it. When the researchers later interviewed center staff, they learned that high operating and licensing costs make these services difficult to sustain for the centers themselves and difficult to afford for the people who seek them. The financial strain is visible in the program’s own numbers: of the 26 centers Oregon had licensed, four closed before the study’s calls even began, and another seven could not be reached by phone. First author Dani Adams, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Missouri who began the research as a postdoctoral fellow at WashU, pointed out that Oregon has dosed more people with psilocybin in a regulated model than anywhere else in the world, yet the treatment remains out of reach for most Americans struggling with their mental health.

The affordability problem carries particular weight for veterans, a population with elevated rates of PTSD, depression and suicide that has fueled bipartisan interest in getting psychedelic-assisted therapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Cabassa observed that in the absence of accessible, affordable regulated care at home, some veterans have instead sought unregulated treatments abroad, a trend that underscores what is at stake in getting domestic access right. The findings also complement a recent cohort study reporting that serious adverse reactions among 346 Oregon clients were uncommon, together building an early evidence base suggesting that the state’s safety architecture is holding up under real-world conditions even as its economic architecture struggles.

The study also reflects the broader maturation of psychedelic science at Washington University, where research has expanded from basic neuroscience to implementation. Co-author Ginger Nicol, a professor of psychiatry at WashU Medicine who co-directs the Center for Holistic Interdisciplinary Research in Psychedelics alongside Cabassa, was principal investigator on a landmark 2024 study published in Nature showing how psilocybin temporarily desynchronizes activity across the human brain, among the first investigations to map the drug’s effects at that scale. Nicol described the new study as an example of the university’s interdisciplinary approach to psychedelic science, noting that the team recognized an opportunity and moved quickly to collect data filling a major gap in scientific knowledge. With this work, she and Cabassa noted, WashU’s footprint in the field now spans everything from brain circuitry to the practical delivery of care.

The study, titled with the mystery shopper’s own framing question, was supported by National Institutes of Health grants along with institutional funding from Washington University, and the funders played no role in the design, conduct, analysis or publication of the research. Its implications reach well beyond Oregon’s borders. As other states consider following Oregon’s lead and as federal policymakers weigh FDA approval pathways for psychedelic therapies, the Oregon data offer the first empirical answer to a deceptively simple question: when a vulnerable person calls a psilocybin center, what actually happens? The answer, for now, is careful screening, supervised sessions and honest conversations, delivered at a price that the system has yet to solve. As Cabassa put it, the task ahead is to figure out what safeguards are needed and make sure they are maintained even as the system works to solve for accessibility, a balancing act that will define the next chapter of psychedelic medicine in America.

Subject of Research: Real-world safety screening and accessibility at Oregon's licensed psilocybin service centers

Article Title: Psilocybin providers follow safety guidelines, study finds

Article References: Psilocybin providers follow safety guidelines, study finds. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: psilocybin, Oregon, psychedelic-assisted therapy, mystery shopper study, mental health screening, Health Affairs Scholar, Washington University in St. Louis, treatment cost, depression, PTSD, drug policy, veterans

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal BMC Public Health, analyzed longitudinal data from 490 participants in the long-running Vancouver Injection Drug Users Study, known as VIDUS, covering the period between March 2022 and February 2024. That window allowed researchers to compare experiences before the pilot began on January 31, 2023, with experiences during its first year of operation. Under the pilot, police in British Columbia were not meant to arrest or charge people for possessing drugs for personal consumption, with a possession threshold defined as 2.5 grams. The policy was framed as a three-year experiment in reducing the harms associated with criminalization, and its conclusion in January 2026 has only intensified scrutiny of what the evidence actually shows.

The headline finding is stark. Before the decriminalization pilot took effect, the quarterly prevalence of police drug seizure without arrest, regardless of the quantity of drugs a person possessed, ranged from 0.8 percent to 2.1 percent of study participants. During the pilot, that figure rose to between 1.1 percent and 4.1 percent. In other words, people in Vancouver reported experiencing more, not fewer, incidents in which police took their drugs away during the first year of a policy explicitly intended to reduce interaction between police and people who use drugs. Kanna Hayashi, co-author of the study and professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University, who holds the St. Paul’s Hospital Chair in Substance Use Research, described the pattern as a significant upward trend of police drug seizures occurring without arrest.

The finding is particularly notable because it appears to diverge from officially reported police statistics. According to figures cited by the Vancouver Police Department, officers officially conducted zero possession seizures below the 2.5-gram threshold between February and October 2023. On paper, that would suggest the decriminalization framework was functioning as designed, with police stepping back from low-level possession enforcement. Yet the new study’s data, which are based on self-reports from people who use drugs rather than on police documentation, allow a different part of the picture to emerge. Hayashi explains that published police-reported statistics only account for events where officers documented an interaction as being related to drug possession, and those interactions may or may not have involved an arrest. Events that officers did not classify in that way would never appear in the official record.

This discrepancy between official statistics and community-reported experience is central to the study’s significance. Hayashi notes that her team’s data may overlap with police-reported figures in some places but likely captured events that did not go on to enter police records at all. Her conclusion is that each dataset is incomplete on its own, but that the two offer deeper insights when viewed together. For researchers and policymakers, this is a methodological lesson as much as a substantive one. Administrative data generated by the very institutions whose conduct is being evaluated can systematically miss the experiences of the people most affected by a policy. Self-reported data from cohorts such as VIDUS, which has followed people who use drugs in Vancouver for decades, provide an independent check on official narratives and can reveal patterns invisible in institutional records.

The consequences of drug seizures without arrest extend well beyond the loss of the substances themselves. The study found that participants who reported having drugs seized by police without arrest were three times more likely to experience a non-fatal overdose. Hayashi explains the mechanism in the context of the toxic drug-supply crisis that has claimed thousands of lives across British Columbia and Canada more broadly. In such a crisis, losing a drug supply can have serious consequences, she says. People may feel they need to replace those drugs immediately. If a person is rushing to obtain new drugs from an unknown source and then rushing to use them to avoid withdrawal symptoms, the risk of overdose increases. In an environment where the unregulated supply is already contaminated with variable and dangerous concentrations of synthetic opioids, any disruption that pushes someone toward an unfamiliar product or urgent use can be lethal.

Community researchers say the findings confirm what people with lived experience of drug use have been reporting for years. Scotty Archondous, a researcher-member at Police Oversight with Evidence and Research, known as P.O.W.E.R., and a board member of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, or VANDU, says the study’s results align with concerns long raised by the community. As a community-based researcher across multiple projects, Archondous reports having heard directly from many people about their experiences of having their personal drug supply seized during decriminalization. The concern, as Archondous describes it, is that people who already live precariously face heightened risks when seizures occur without charges or arrest, because of what comes next: debts, desperation, and sometimes disrupted access to a trusted source. For people dependent on a regular supply, an unexpected seizure can cascade into unsafe borrowing, unsafe sourcing, or withdrawal-driven urgency.

The study also highlights a conceptual tension at the heart of the pilot’s design. Decriminalization removed the threat of arrest and prosecution for possession below the 2.5-gram threshold, but it did not remove police authority to seize drugs. An officer who cannot charge someone may still confiscate their substances, and from the perspective of the person on the street, the outcome, losing their supply, can be nearly identical to the outcome of the enforcement practices decriminalization was meant to replace. The data showing a rise in seizure reports without a corresponding rise in arrests suggest that the enforcement behavior adapted to the new legal framework rather than disappearing. Whether those seizures reflected officers exercising discretion in ambiguous situations, responding to public complaints, or operating under internal directives is a question the study’s data cannot fully answer, but the pattern itself is now documented with longitudinal rigor.

For Hayashi, the central takeaway is that data informed by people with lived experience must be viewed in tandem with official police statistics if policymakers want an accurate account of how decriminalization actually operated. Even though the pilot has ended, she argues that it is important to understand what happened and what can be improved, because those lessons can help shape future decriminalization policies in British Columbia and elsewhere. Jurisdictions considering similar approaches, from other Canadian provinces to cities and countries abroad, will be watching the British Columbia experiment closely. The study’s evidence suggests that the technical design of such policies matters enormously: thresholds, seizure powers, reporting requirements, and oversight mechanisms all shape whether decriminalization reduces police contact or merely changes its form.

The broader context makes these findings urgent. British Columbia’s decriminalization pilot was introduced amid a toxic drug-supply crisis that has driven historically high rates of overdose deaths, and the policy was one of the most prominent attempts in North America to treat drug use as a health issue rather than a criminal one. The pilot’s early end and the political controversy surrounding it have made rigorous evaluation all the more important. This study does not claim that decriminalization failed outright, nor does it conclude that police acted improperly; what it documents is a measurable gap between the policy’s stated goal of reducing police interaction with people who use drugs and the lived reality reported by a well-characterized cohort in Vancouver. It also quantifies a concrete harm, the tripling of non-fatal overdose risk among those whose drugs were seized, that any future policy framework will need to address directly. As Hayashi and her colleagues make clear, the value of the pilot lies in what can be learned from it, and those lessons are now on the record.

Subject of Research: Police drug seizures without arrest during British Columbia's drug decriminalization pilot in Vancouver

Article Title: Reports of drug seizures by police rose during first year of decriminalization, SFU study finds​

Article References: Reports of drug seizures by police rose during first year of decriminalization, SFU study finds​. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: drug decriminalization, British Columbia, Vancouver, police drug seizures, Simon Fraser University, BMC Public Health, overdose risk, toxic drug supply, VIDUS, harm reduction, drug policy, public health

Methadone remains one of the most effective treatments for opioid use disorder, reducing illicit opioid use, overdose risk, and mortality when taken consistently under medical supervision. Yet in the United States, access to methadone is tightly constrained by a regulatory architecture unlike that governing any other medication. Patients must typically travel daily to a specialized opioid treatment program, often called a methadone clinic, to receive their doses under observation. These clinics are concentrated in urban areas, leaving large swaths of rural America effectively unserved. The result is a treatment system in which the medication with the strongest evidence base is also the hardest to obtain, a paradox that has drawn increasing criticism from addiction medicine specialists and public health researchers alike.

One proposed solution is the pharmacy medication unit, a model in which a licensed pharmacy partners with an opioid treatment program to administer or dispense methadone at the pharmacy’s location. Under this arrangement, known formally as pharmacy administration and dispensing of methadone for opioid use disorder, the opioid treatment program retains medical responsibility for the patient while the pharmacy serves as a convenient, community-embedded point of access. Federal regulations permit such arrangements, and they have been used in other countries for decades, but the model remains rare in the United States. The Duke-led survey was designed to answer a deceptively simple question: are American pharmacists ready to take on this role?

The answer, in many respects, is cautiously encouraging. Of the 585 pharmacists surveyed, 57.2 percent expressed confidence in their ability to develop a partnership with an opioid treatment program to establish or participate in a pharmacy methadone medication unit. Meanwhile, 39.2 percent believed that most of their peers would be interested in participating in such a program, and 25.1 percent said they themselves were likely to build a partnership with an opioid treatment program to take part. These numbers suggest a meaningful reservoir of professional goodwill that could be tapped if the structural obstacles were addressed.

But the survey also exposed profound gaps in awareness and experience. Only 6.2 percent of respondents reported having ever worked at an opioid treatment program, and just 37.9 percent were aware that federal and state regulations already allow pharmacy-based methadone medication units. In other words, most pharmacists have never encountered the model, and most do not know it is even legal. That combination of unfamiliarity and regulatory opacity represents a formidable barrier, because pharmacists who do not know a practice exists are unlikely to advocate for it, pursue training in it, or negotiate the partnerships it requires.

The statistical analysis uncovered patterns in who felt most prepared. Pharmacists who were male, who identified with a racial category other than White or Asian, who practiced in the Western United States rather than the Northeast, who worked at an independent pharmacy rather than a hospital or clinic pharmacy, and who were owners, partners, or managers rather than staff pharmacists reported higher odds of feeling confident in their ability to forge a partnership with an opioid treatment program. Similar demographic patterns emerged for stated intention to participate, with male pharmacists, Asian pharmacists, and those in the other race category showing increased odds of expressing willingness to build such partnerships. The findings on practice setting and role are particularly telling: pharmacists with greater autonomy and decision-making authority, such as independent pharmacy owners, appear more inclined to embrace the model, suggesting that institutional flexibility matters as much as individual attitude.

When asked about barriers, the surveyed pharmacists were candid. Concerns about workload topped the list, reflecting the daily dosing schedule that methadone treatment typically demands and the staffing pressures already straining community pharmacies. Regulatory complexity and liability exposure also weighed heavily, as did a lack of training specific to methadone dispensing and the needs of patients with opioid use disorder. These concerns are not trivial. Methadone carries a narrow therapeutic window, and dispensing it safely requires knowledge of drug interactions, overdose risk, and the clinical protocols that opioid treatment programs follow. Pharmacists accustomed to filling prescriptions for chronic conditions would need structured education and clear practice guidelines before taking on the responsibility.

Yet the perceived benefits were equally compelling. Pharmacists pointed to improved access to treatment as the primary advantage, noting that pharmacies are often open extended hours, located in neighborhoods far from any clinic, and already trusted by the communities they serve. Expanding the number of dispensing points could reduce the daily travel burden that forces many patients to choose between holding a job and receiving their medication. Pharmacists also highlighted the potential to serve more patients overall and, notably, to reduce the stigma that many patients associate with standing in line at a methadone clinic. Receiving treatment at a neighborhood pharmacy, alongside neighbors picking up blood pressure medication or antibiotics, could normalize addiction treatment in a way that specialized clinics cannot.

The study’s authors argue that translating this latent willingness into actual practice will require coordinated action. They call for collective efforts among state pharmacy boards, pharmacist associations, and opioid treatment-related authorities to develop feasible program designs and to establish clear guidelines and training requirements for pharmacies and pharmacists wishing to participate in methadone medication units. Continuing pharmacy education could address the knowledge gap, while regulatory clarification could ease liability concerns. The survey was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and approved by the Duke University Health System Institutional Review Board, and the authors report no competing interests.

As the opioid epidemic continues to claim lives across the country, the survey offers both a warning and an invitation. The warning is that good intentions alone will not build a pharmacy-based methadone system; without training, regulatory guidance, and deliberate partnership structures, the model will remain a footnote in addiction treatment policy. The invitation is that a substantial share of the pharmacy profession is already prepared to say yes, waiting only for the systems, education, and institutional support that would allow them to do so safely. If policymakers and professional bodies respond to that readiness, the corner pharmacy could soon become one of the most important front lines in the fight against opioid overdose, bringing a proven medication to patients in the communities where they live and work rather than behind the doors of distant clinics.

Subject of Research: Pharmacist readiness for pharmacy-based methadone dispensing for opioid use disorder in the United States

Article Title: Pharmacy administration and dispensing of methadone for opioid use disorder: a survey of U.S. pharmacists

Article References: Wu, L.-T., Easter, M., Gilbert, A., Hagemeier, N., & Schwartz, R. P. (2026). Pharmacy administration and dispensing of methadone for opioid use disorder: a survey of U.S. pharmacists. Addiction Science & Clinical Practice. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13722-026-00724-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13722-026-00724-9

Keywords: methadone, opioid use disorder, pharmacists, opioid treatment program, medication unit, pharmacy practice, survey research, opioid epidemic, treatment access, harm reduction, drug policy, Duke University