Structural interventions to improve opiate maintenance

Public health interventions targeting drug users can focus on changing individual risk behaviors or on changing the social and environmental contexts which facilitate individual risk taking. In this article, we focus on the latter interventions, creating a framework for understanding which structural interventions might be useful in reducing risk. We apply the framework to the example of opiate maintenance therapy in the United States to supply examples of structural barriers to maintenance therapy and describe how structural interventions can be useful in reducing these barriers.