Associations With Substance Abuse Treatment Completion Among Drug Court Participants

Subjects in the study included all participants (N = 573) in drug treatment court in a mid-sized U.S. city from 1996 through 2004. Administrative data from the drug court 1 The term drug court, which has become tradition-driven and bound, is misleading and can more accurately be considered to be a drug user treatment facilitating court. Inaccurate nosologies, whatever their underpinnings and stakeholders, do not increase the necessary quality and effectiveness of appropriate substance use intervention planning, implementation, or assessment. Editor's note. included measures of demographics and socioeconomics, substance use, and criminal justice history. Stepwise multivariate logistic regression yielded a final model of failure to complete drug treatment. 2 The term drug treatment, also tradition-bound, which is not pharmacotherapy or chemotherapy, is also misleading. Treatment can be briefly and usefully defined as a planned, goal directed, temporally structured change process, of necessary quality, appropriateness, and conditions (endogenous and exogenous), which is bounded (culture, place, time, etc.) and can be categorized into professional-based, tradition-based, mutual-help based (AA, NA, etc.) and self-help (“natural recovery”) models. There are no unique models or techniques used with substance users—of whatever types and heterogeneities—which are not also used with non-substance users. In the West, with the relatively new ideology of “harm reduction” and the even newer quality of life (QoL) treatment-driven model, there are now a new set of goals in addition to those derived from/associated with the older tradition of abstinence-driven models. Editor's note. Unemployment, lower educational attainment, and cocaine use disorders were associated with failure to complete treatment. The limitations of administrative data should be considered in the interpretation of results.