Incentive to Work Helps to Keep Addicts Drug Free
An experimental program in Baltimore, Maryland, has been successful in helping drug-abusing women stay free of drugs by paying them a salary to attend a work/training program.
In the Therapeutic Workplace, patients are hired and paid to work. To link salary to drug abstinence, patients are required to provide drug-free urine samples to gain daily access to the workplace. In the workplace, patients are paid either to perform assigned jobs or to participate in training to learn how to do those jobs.
Dr. Alan I. Leshner, NIDA director, says "This project brings into the real world the results of many years of previous research that demonstrate that reward-based treatment programs do result in decreased drug use. The barrier to general applicability of these treatment programs has been that practical funding mechanisms have not been available to sustain them. This program may provide a model solution to that problem."
Each day, when a participant reported to the workplace, she was required to provide a urine sample. If the sample was drug free, she was allowed to work that day. After completing a 3-hour work shift, she received a basic pay voucher. Patients could earn additional vouchers for appropriate professional demeanor, for meeting daily learning goals, and for data entry productivity.
Participation in the workplace program nearly doubled the patients' abstinence from opiates and cocaine, as determined by urine samples collected 3 times a week during the six-month study period. Over the course of the program, 59 percent of the urine samples from the workplace women were drug-free, compared to 33 percent of the samples from the control group women. Forty percent of the Therapeutic Workplace participants had drug-free urine samples on at least 75 percent of testing occasions; in contrast, only10 percent of the control participants did so.
- WHAT IT MEANS: This study provides some support for the notion that salary for work can be used to reinforce drug abstinence.
The study, led by Dr. Kenneth Silverman, appears in the February 2001 issue ofExperimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology.