Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Evidence-based Principles of Treatment (EPT) project is conducting meta-analyses on drug abuse treatment studies to assess whether the National Institute on Drug Abuse's (1999) "Principles of Drug Addiction Treatment” and the principles of effective correctional treatment by Andrews and colleagues (1990) are supported by empirical research on drug abuse treatment over the past thirty years. In this presentation, we examine the Andrews et al.’s risk principle, which states that treatment, particularly intensive treatment, should mainly be reserved for clients at high risk of offending. In preliminary analyses of the EPT database (over 200 treatment-control comparisons), we used risk level (first risk for crime, then risk for substance abuse relapse) as a moderator of the effect size for post-treatment drug use. Since relatively few study samples were coded as low or medium risk, these were combined and then contrasted with high risk samples. Preliminary results (using random effects modeling) suggest that (1) study samples rated as high risk of offending had larger effect sizes than samples rated as low-medium risk of offending across various treatment orientations (e.g., psychosocial, behavioral, cognitive) and (2) results for risk for drug use relapse were inconsistent across orientations.