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New directions

While the researchers continue to mine data from the most recent wave of interviews, they are starting to gear up for two more waves of research with an additional $7.3 million in grants from NIH. The new studies are projected to take five years and will piggyback on the researchers’ deep reservoir of data and experience.

In one study, researchers will examine a national sample of therapeutic communities to see how structure and organizational effectiveness influence performance. Therapeutic communities essentially are long-term residential programs for people addicted to opiates. Treatment is based on the notion that many opiate addicts need habilitation, not rehabilitation, Roman said.

“They have not learned the correct rules of functioning in society,” he said. “The therapeutic community starts them like kindergartners and trains them in how to live, and in many cases, patients live in a therapeutic community for 18 months or more.

“One of the things we’ll look at is the same one-size-fits-all notion we found in private treatment centers. Nobody has looked at the variation you find across therapeutic communities,” he said.

Like their previous research, this study also will focus on overall health of therapeutic communities.

In the other new study, the UGA team will compare rates of incorporating new substance abuse treatments among three kinds of drug rehab centers: private centers, public centers and centers that participate in the NIH Clinical Trials Network for Drug Abuse Treatment.

The goal is to determine whether exposure to new treatments through intense, clinical-trial participation affects treatment offerings, treatment quality and quantity, and the overall institutional stability. The sociologists also will look for differences in practices and attitudes toward new innovations among the three groups as well as how administrators learn about the latest innovations.

“The idea is to compare the adoption and implementation of innovations within the NIH network — which has been specifically created for that purpose — to national samples of public and private centers,” Johnson said.

The study will involve 900 substance abuse treatment centers: 400 private centers from their current research, 400 public treatment centers the team is now recruiting and 100 centers affiliated with the NIH clinical trials network.

While the researchers won’t have definitive answers for five years, they predict that centers exposed to the latest, science-based treatments during clinical trials will be much more likely to adopt new treatments and will be more stable.

Their findings can’t come too soon for rehab centers or for the one million Americans who seek alcohol treatment each year.

For more information, email Paul Roman at proman@uga.edu or J. Aaron Johnson at ajohns@uga.edu or access www.niaaa.nih.gov.

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