Despite the controversial nature of illicit drug treatment, there is a relative lack of research on policy formation in this area. This paper draws on qualitative interviews with service providers and analysis of policy documents, conducted for an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council funded project entitled `Comparing the role of takeaways in methadone maintenance treatment in New South Wales and Victoria', to examine the formation and implementation of drug treatment policy. In particular, it considers two forces widely acknowledged to be important to drug treatment, and often argued to be antithetical to each other: community values and scientific evidence. Separation of the `social' and the `scientific' in treatment is a much-used but conceptually limited distinction. Two alternatives to evidence-based policy are proposed. The first, values-based policy, is increasingly important to critical discussions of social policy and could potentially add much to debates around drug treatment policy. The second alternative is suggested by social studies of science (STS), in particular feminist STS.
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