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A single meeting with a
peer addiction educator during a routine medical visit
has helped out-of-treatment cocaine and opiate abusers
attain abstinence, report NIDA-funded researchers who
conducted a study at three Boston clinics. The peer
educators were bilingual individuals in long-term
recovery recruited from the same ethnically mixed
community as the out-of-treatment drug abusers. The
meeting consisted of a structured motivational interview
that culminated in a plan for recovery and referrals.
"Talking with a person like yourself—someone who knows
your language and culture and views you as an equal, who
has successfully recovered from addiction—shows that
change is possible and seems to motivate people to get
off drugs. It's not a substitute for treatment, but it
is a good first step," says Dr. Edward Bernstein of
Boston University School of Medicine, one of the lead
investigators of the study.
Dr. Bernstein and his coinvestigator Dr. Judith
Bernstein hired and trained individuals who had been in
recovery for at least 3 years to serve as peer educators
and research assistants. This staff then screened 23,669
outpatients who were seeking routine medical care at
Boston Medical Center walk-in clinics between May 1998
and November 2000. Altogether 1,175 patients (about 5
percent of those screened) met the criteria for study
participation—they reported abusing cocaine, opiates, or
both drugs during the past 30 days; scored 3 or higher
on the Drug Abuse Severity Test; and were not in
addiction treatment or protective custody—and agreed to
participate. A research assistant met with each
participant to administer further assessments, including
an abbreviated Addiction Severity Index (ASI), and an
educator then randomly assigned each patient to either
an intervention or a control group. Similar proportions
of patients in the two groups had abused cocaine (about
half), opiates (about 10 percent), or both drugs (33 to
40 percent) during the month before the study (see
"Demographic Characteristics of 1,175 Study
Participants"). |
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