Successful Completion of Substance Misuse Treatment in the Dane County Drug Court Treatment Program

Dane County provides a drug court treatment program as an alternative to incarceration for non-violent drug offenders with substance-related disorders. It is one of over 900 similar programs in counties and tribal areas across the country that provides community based substance abuse treatment, case assessment and management. The goal of this diversion program is to reduce the burden of drug related crimes to society and reduce recidivism.

The Department of Family Medicine research faculty member, Randy Brown, MD and research specialist, Megan Zuelsdorff, have been analyzing the Dane County program data looking for reasons that the 160 participants either completed or failed to complete substance misuse treatment during 2001 and 2002. They looked at:

• Demographic information and indicators of socioeconomic status
• Social support
• Criminal history, and
• Substance use history

When controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity, the participants with an alcohol use disorder were nearly six times more likely to fail to complete treatment. Dr. Brown concluded that substance use factors appear to be of greater importance than demographic/social factors in treatment completion, and alcohol misuse influences likelihood of treatment completion to a greater degree than illicit substance misuse. This finding is an important one, as alcohol use disorders are typically not addressed by drug court treatment programming. This provides new information for those planning future programs.

Future work will include more comprehensive analyses of data for all participants in the drug court treatment program during program years 1996-2004, a total of 572 individuals.