According to the Partnership to End Addiction, citing addiction expert reports to Kaiser Health News, SAMHSA’s national website, designed to help people find addiction treatment, contains inaccurate and outdated information. The site, Findtreatment.gov, receives nearly 300,000 page views a month. It’s the tool many state and local helplines use when trying to connect someone to treatment. According to Dr. Cara Poland, a doctor from a psychiatric hospital in Michigan, “It’s being treated as a gold-standard tool, but it’s not.”

This is not the first time that SAMHSA’s credibility, in terms of providing accurate information to the public, has been criticized. At the end of 2017, SAMHSA suspended it’s National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP). At the time, SAMHSA former Assistant Secretary Elinore F. McCance-Katz said she took the action because NREPP was “so deficient in both rigor and breadth that it must be replaced.”

However, according to a report published in PubMed, “… a closer examination of her claims about the Registry indicates many of them to be inaccurate. Contrary to her assertions, the Registry is not devoid of medication-assisted treatments for opioid use; nor does it contain but a scant few interventions related to schizophrenia and psychosis.”

The national government website designed to help people find addiction treatment contains inaccurate and outdated information, addiction experts tell Kaiser Health News. The site, Findtreatment.gov, has information about more than 13,000 state-licensed treatment facilities, including what types of services are provided, which insurance plans the facilities accept and what ages they serve.