Research in the concept‐based therapeutic community – its importance to European treatment research in the drug field1

The concept‐based therapeutic community (TC) has been more scrutinised than almost every treatment model in the drug field except for methadone maintenance treatment. Important reasons for emphasising research right from the beginning were financial and/or ideological. Because of strong, ideological reasons and because of extensive research, the American TC movement has had a great impact on the treatment field of drug abusers in Europe. However, independent of the TC movement, at the same time the European treatment field also initiated several important research projects. In particular the Scandinavian countries were active in process studies with a qualitative approach. For different reasons this research tradition in Scandinavia was never considered important in the international research society. In recent years this has changed, and there is now a consensus about the need for more process evaluation and phenomenological research to complement the large body of quantitative studies in the treatment field. Probably both American and European treatment research has contributed to the preservation of the best from the original TC models and a renunciation of the more destructive elements.