The 2026 annual meeting of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) recently concluded in San Diego, California. From April 23 through April 26, the 57th ASAM Annual Conference was the year’s defining event for addiction medicine where healthcare professionals from around the world met to discuss the latest research and network with peers. 

Today’s recap of the 2026 ASAM Annual Conference features a curated selection of posters on opioid-related topics that were presented at the conference. Some descriptions were edited for clarity and brevity. To view the complete versions of the posters, along with the dozens of other posters presented during the event, visit the conference's poster archive.

Opioid Posters from the 2026 ASAM Annual Conference

Advancing Clinician-Informed, Symptom-Specific Approaches to Opioid Withdrawal Care

  • Description: Opioid withdrawal syndrome is a predictable and distressing consequence of opioid cessation in individuals with opioid use disorder. Although rarely life-threatening, poorly managed withdrawal can lead to treatment dropout, return to use, and loss of trust in care systems. Effective withdrawal management is therefore critical to patient engagement, stabilization, and recovery. Nurses and frontline staff frequently rely on institutional habits or individual provider preference rather than standardized protocols, contributing to inconsistent care experiences. To address this gap, [the researchers] surveyed addiction medicine and psychiatry specialists to identify the most commonly used non-opioid medications for specific withdrawal symptoms. Findings will inform the development of a practical job aid that links common withdrawal symptoms to recommended non-opioid medications to enhance clinical consistency, empower nursing staff, and support patient autonomy within trauma-informed, person-centered models of addiction care.
  • Conclusion: Clonidine, tizanidine, ondansetron, loperamide, hydroxyzine, acetaminophen, and trazodone were most frequently used, while antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, and gabapentinoids showed variable use, reflecting reliance on provider preference rather than standardized, evidence-based protocols. FDA-approved lofexidine and other potentially effective agents, such as memantine and mirtazapine, were rarely used.

Stigma as a Barrier to Early Retention in MOUD Treatment

  • Description: Medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) substantially reduce opioid use and overdose deaths. However, treatment retention remains low, with fewer than 50% of individuals engaged at six months. Stigma is a critical barrier to care, affecting treatment seeking, engagement, and retention. The present study aimed to describe stigma experiences among individuals initiating MOUD care with BUP, examine the relationship between stigma and attitudes towards MOUD, and assess how stigma relates to early MOUD treatment retention (i.e., after 30 days).
  • Conclusion: Participants with lower stigma reported significantly less pressure to discontinue buprenorphine and demonstrated significantly greater early engagement and retention compared with those with higher stigma, suggesting that stigma is closely linked to perceived pressure surrounding BUP treatment and may influence early retention.

Opioid Use Disorder Treatment Model: Access to Healthcare Barrier Survey

  • Description: The intention of this study is to provide a systematic assessment of the barriers preventing a person with opioid use disorder from seeking medication therapy and to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of a traditional medications for opioid use disorder clinic as compared to a mobile health clinic. Additionally, an overarching goal is to learn why those with opioid use disorder prefer a mobile health clinic for their medications for opioid use disorder treatment.
  • Conclusion: There are two immediate conclusions to make when assessing strengths of the mobile health clinic and why people with opioid use disorder  frequent mobile health clinics over traditional clinics: transportation and convenience. Additionally, the convenience of having all resources combined highlights the fact that, in terms of medications for opioid use disorder and harm reduction as the primary reason for interacting with healthcare interface, the mobile health clinic was more convenient and perceived resource dense than a traditional clinic.

Buprenorphine Dose and Pain Outcomes in Opioid Use Disorder and Chronic Pain

  • Description: Chronic pain is a significant comorbid condition among patients with opioid use disorder (OUD), with 45% of patients receiving treatment for OUD having chronic pain. Despite the prevalence of chronic pain in this population, two-third of patients reported that their chronic pain was inadequately managed by their addiction treatment program, which may contribute to early treatment drop-out and increased risk of relapse. This study aims to investigate whether buprenorphine treatment reduces pain intensity and interference among adult patients with co-occurring OUD and chronic pain.
  • Conclusion: Individualized buprenorphine treatment dosing is associated with significant decreases in pain intensity and interference scores. While buprenorphine doses were titrated based on opioid use, withdrawal, and medication adverse effects, participants receiving higher doses had greater pain on average and pain interference with mood, relationships, and life enjoyment.

Optimizing Geographic Naloxone Distribution to Reduce Opioid Overdose Deaths

  • Description: Naloxone is highly effective in preventing opioid overdose deaths (OODs), yet decision-makers lack practical tools to allocate naloxone to areas where demand is greatest and limited resources can achieve the greatest impact. To support evidence-based naloxone distribution, [the researchers proposed] a simulation-based decision-support framework to optimize the geographic allocation of naloxone to minimize OODs.
  • Conclusion: The proposed framework can help reduce OODs by approximately 5% without increasing the number of naloxone kits distributed. This finding highlights the potential of evidence-based optimization to improve the public health impact of existing resources and inform broader resource allocation decisions.

Overcoming Barriers to Outpatient Buprenorphine Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder

  • Description: Patients have identified flexibility of services and a harm reduction approach as positive features of low threshold walk-in visits in urban areas. Applying this approach, a clinic in Toronto, Ontario saw 42% of patients retained following treatment initiation through a walk-in and 65% of opioid use disorder patients continued buprenorphine treatment after initiation. In other health care settings, walk-in access has been shown to benefit racially and socially underserved groups, but there is scant evidence of whether these trends hold for patients in opioid use disorder treatment.This study assesses the effectiveness of low-threshold walk-in visits at increasing access for populations less likely to engage with healthcare.
  • Conclusion: Opening the walk-in clinic was associated with a substantial increase in overall clinic utilization, with the largest relative gains among groups that often face barriers to care, including men, Black/African American and Hispanic/Latinx patients, and patients with unstable housing. In addition, attendance also increased among patients with no prior buprenorphine treatment and among those whose prior treatment occurred outside the Cooper health system or in nontraditional settings (during incarceration or via self-treatment), suggesting the clinic lowered thresholds for both entry and re-entry into opioid use disorder care.

Determinants of Naloxone Favorability and Carrying in the General Public

  • Description: Despite its favorable safety profile and expanding availability, naloxone remains underutilized in the general population. While awareness and carrying rates are relatively high among individuals with opioid use disorder (OUD), only a small minority of U.S. adults report carrying naloxone, suggesting persistent gaps in knowledge, perceived relevance, and engagement in overdose response.
  • Conclusion: In this community-based sample, most participants reported favorable attitudes toward naloxone; however, the majority had never carried it, highlighting a persistent gap between acceptability and harm reduction behavior. Consistent with prior literature, support for public health-oriented approaches to OUD, greater familiarity with naloxone, and higher overdose response knowledge were associated with more favorable naloxone attitudes.

Naloxone Vending at Jail Release Works Without Mandatory Overdose Education

  • Description: Individuals released from incarceration face an especially elevated risk of fatal overdose in the immediate post-release period, driven by reduced opioid tolerance, polysubstance exposure, and limited access to care and harm reduction resources. Naloxone-on-release programs have demonstrated effectiveness in reducing overdose mortality, yet implementation in carceral settings has been constrained by logistical barriers, staffing limitations, and training requirements.
  • Conclusion: Engagement with video-based overdose education was low, and video viewing was not associated with naloxone dispensation. Naloxone uptake was instead associated with perceived personal/community overdose risk, prior vending machine use, and substance use patterns linked to elevated overdose risk.

Pre-EMS Naloxone Administrator Role and Predictors of Receiving Subsequent Naloxone by EMS

  • Description: The primary objective of this analysis is to determine if administrator role (bystander, police, fire personnel, self-administration, or community health worker) and pre-EMS naloxone dose impacts the need for additional naloxone administered by EMS.
  • Conclusion: Those who received more pre-EMS naloxone and had naloxone administered by community health workers were less likely to receive naloxone by EMS (compared to bystanders and other non-medical first responders).

Real-World Analysis of Buprenorphine-Precipitated Opioid Withdrawal: A Multicenter Study

  • Description: With the prevalence of high-potency fentanyl and fentanyl analogs in the illicit opioid supply, buprenorphine induction is increasingly challenging to avoid precipitated withdrawal and may represent a barrier to patient treatment engagement. More research is needed to understand what factors are associated with precipitated withdrawal among buprenorphine inductions to optimize clinical treatment guidelines and reduce patient barriers.
  • Conclusion: Higher doses of buprenorphine for the first dose were associated with suspected BPOW. Since this study is conducted in real-world clinical settings, Clinical Opiate Withdrawal Scale (COWS) scores are not systematically and routinely documented in electronic health records, which is a limitation to the current analysis. However, suspected buprenorphine-precipitated opioid withdrawal is documented by the treating medical toxicologist based on the signs and symptoms of the patient after the first dose of buprenorphine. Significant site variation exists in buprenorphine-precipitated opioid withdrawal and the first dose of buprenorphine.

Addiction-Informed Opioid-Sparing Pain Care in the ED: ED-ALT Outcomes

  • Description: Traditional opioid-centric pain management may increase overdose risk and undermine engagement in addiction treatment. Opioid-sparing, addiction-informed alternatives are therefore critical, particularly in urban safety-net settings. The Emergency Department Alternatives to Opioids (ED-ALT) initiative at University Hospital in Newark, NJ, is a SAMHSA-funded, multimodal program integrating pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic strategies to reduce opioid exposure while maintaining effective analgesia.
  • Conclusion: In a high-risk, urban ED population with substantial SUD prevalence, a comprehensive ED-ALT program achieved clinically meaningful pain relief without increased opioid exposure and supported high rates of ED-initiated MOUD. Importantly, underlying SUD status did not attenuate analgesic response. These findings support the integration of opioid-sparing, addiction-informed pain management as a scalable strategy to advance opioid stewardship, reduce stigma, and improve linkage to evidence-based addiction treatment in emergency care settings.

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