Redefining success in cannabis use disorder treatment with Toby Atkin

In this episode, Dr Elle Wadsworth talks to Dr Tobias (Toby) Atkin, psychiatrist and a research fellow in Addiction Psychiatry at Columbia University in the US. The interview covers Toby’s opinion and debate piece on redefining success in cannabis use disorder treatment.

[There are some light knocks/clicks in this episode – we apologise for any disruption!]

• The motivation behind Toby’s opinion and debate piece [00:50]
• The treatments that are available for cannabis use disorder today [02:52]
• The limitations of abstinence-focused endpoints in cannabis use disorder treatment [04:50]
• What we can learn from tobacco and alcohol in terms of reduction-based outcomes in cannabis use disorder treatment [06:26]
• Methodological challenges with measuring outcomes for cannabis use disorder treatment [08:23]
• The tiered outcome framework proposed in Toby’s article [09:26]
• Different measures of abstinence in cannabis use disorder trials [11:45]
• The decision to choose frequency over quantity as the core outcome [13:06]
• The key messages of the article [14:18]
• What Toby hopes to get out of this opinion and debate piece [16:27]

About Elle Wadsworth: Elle is an academic fellow with the Society for the Study of Addiction. She is based at the University of Bath with the Addiction and Mental Health Group and her research interests include drug policy, cannabis legalisation, and public health. Elle holds a voluntary role at The Loop, a non-profit service provider of drug checking in the UK.

About Toby Atkin, MD: Toby is an addiction psychiatry fellow in the Division of Pathophysiology and Treatment Research at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He completed psychiatry residency at Columbia and is supported by a NIDA T32 fellowship under the mentorship of Frances Levin, MD, and Christina Brezing, MD. His research examines psychiatric comorbidity and treatment outcomes in substance use disorders, including a latent class analysis of psychiatric subtypes in opioid use disorder treatment and a pilot randomised trial of viloxazine for alcohol use disorder. He maintains a private practice in Brooklyn treating mood and addiction disorders.

Declarations of interest: None

Original article: Beyond abstinence: Redefining success in cannabis use disorder treatment https://doi.org/10.1111/add.70517

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