Past Webinars

Increasing Access to Medication Assisted Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder in the Criminal Justice Setting
October 21, 2020 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EST

Webinar Recording is now available. *NEW

PowerPoint Presentations:

This is one of the major policy initiatives for AATOD and we know that you will find the information to be of great value.

AATOD is offered a criminal justice webinar which builds on the webinars that we have produced in the past as we steadily increase access to MAT in the correctional setting.

Mark Parrino, AATOD President, introduced the webinar and served as its moderator and there were two featured speakers.

· Paul Samuels (President/Legal Action Center) focused on the work of the Legal Action Center in moving this policy forward. The LAC is one of the leading authorities in this area and they published a groundbreaking report in 2011 on this topic.

· Linda Hurley (CEO/CODAC) provided an update of the workings and achievements of her team’s implementation of a successful OTP in the Rhode Island correctional system with the support of the State Opioid Treatment Authority and Department of Corrections. CODAC is the largest opioid treatment program system in RI and their model serves as one of the great success stories in this area.

There was time for Q&A at the end of these presentations.

Speaker Biographies
Paul N. Samuels is Director/President of the Legal Action Center, a not-for-profit public interest law firm with offices in New York City and Washington, D.C. specializing in legal and policy issues involving criminal justice, substance use disorders and mental health (SUD/MH), AIDS and. For more than four decades Mr. Samuels has worked on a wide range of SUD/MH and criminal justice legal and policy issues at the federal, state, and local levels, including developing creative strategies to increase public and private financing for alternatives to reincarceration, reentry services and substance use disorder and mental health treatment, and to move the criminal justice system to a primary focus on diverting people to needed health care and other community supervision and services rather than punishment and incarceration. Mr. Samuels has worked with a broad range of government agencies, service providers, advocates and directly impacted people to implement those strategies and educate the public and policymakers.
Linda E. Hurley, MA, CAGS President and Chief Executive Officer ~ CODAC, Inc. Linda Hurley, President and CEO of CODAC Behavioral Healthcare, which is RI’s oldest and largest outpatient opioid treatment program (OTP) and provider of general outpatient addiction services, behavioral health care, and recovery resources, has been working in substance abuse treatment and behavioral healthcare for more than 30 years. In early 2016, CODAC and the DOC launched a program to expand Medication Assisted Treatment at the ACI. Under this initiative, CODAC provides all three FDA approved medications to inmates, depending on individual needs. This is a first-in-the-nation program, highlighted by the Department of Justice as a national model.