The toxic drug crisis continues to devastate individuals, families, and communities across Canada, with more than 30,000 opioid-related deaths recorded from January 2016 to March 2023. Dangerous patterns of prescription opioid use remain a major health threat, and opioid use disorder (OUD) is now one of the greatest challenges facing the Canadian health care system. Clients with OUD frequently present with concurrent risky use of numerous other drugs and high rates of comorbid alcohol, anxiolytic/sedative, stimulant (cocaine/ amphetamines, and cannabis use disorders.
Treatment for OUD generally involves pharmacological treatments such as opioid agonist therapy (OAT). While OAT has had well-documented positive harm reduction effects in decreasing illicit opioid use, overdose mortality, and bloodborne infections (HIV/HCV), adjunct psychosocial approaches may curb polysubstance use, increase OAT retention, and reduce overdose events, providing new solutions to the ongoing toxic drug crisis. Clinical practice guidelines for management of OUD, released by the Canadian Psychological Association’s Opioid Taskforce and the Canadian Research Initiative on Substance Misuse network (CRISM) have advocated for the implementation of psychosocial treatments as adjunctive interventions in opioid addiction medicine.
PreVenture, a psychosocial intervention for targeting polysubstance use, has recently been adapted to OUD clients in the OAT clinic context; this adaptation has been named “OpiVenture”. The U.S. National Institute of Health’s (NIH’s) ORBIT model for psychosocial and behavioral treatment development provides guidance through four phases for improving the systematic development of new behavioral interventions.