His Research on Pregnant Opioid Users Was Widely Celebrated. Auditors and Experts Found Major Flaws. by Amy Yurkanin August 24, 2026, 6:00 am

His Research on Pregnant Opioid Users Was Widely Celebrated. Auditors and Experts Found Major Flaws. by Amy Yurkanin August 24, 2026, 6:00 am His Research on Pregnant Opioid Users Was Widely Celebrated. Auditors and Experts Found Major Flaws. https://www.propublica.org/article/craig-towers-knoxville-tennessee-newborn-withdrawal-study?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=secondary Dr. Craig Towers was hailed as a hero for his research on detoxing pregnant opioid users. After he published a study that found naltrexone could help patients stay off drugs, addiction specialists started asking if his work was too good to be true. Eight addiction and pregnancy specialists raised concerns about Towers’ study in a 2020 letter to his employer, the University of Tennessee. A university audit found that Towers had failed to get university approval for the study, that he provided “inaccurate and/or unverifiable, contradictory source documentation” for a component of the study and that he did not provide research databases or data analysis as requested. Auditors also were unable to determine the extent to which he protected confidential patient health information. In 2023, the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the journal that published the research, published a 78-word correction stating that the study had been improperly listed as a “prospective,” a rigorous type of research that follows patients in real time. We shared Towers’ study, the university’s audit and the journal’s correction with five experts on research ethics and substance abuse during pregnancy. All of them said that the documents raised major concerns about Towers’ conduct as a researcher and that the journal’s response didn’t do enough to address the issues the university unearthed. Elsevier, the company that publishes AJOG, disputed the experts’ assessment and said in a statement: “We uphold the highest standards of rigor and ethics in our publishing to protect the quality and integrity of research.” Towers told us the audit had reached erroneous conclusions, the auditors did not give him the opportunity to fully defend his work and the fact that the journal hasn’t retracted the study is proof that his research is sound. Towers said he stands by naltrexone as a treatment option: “I believe it is crucial in medicine to revisit old assumptions and consider all options.”