How helpful are drug abuse helplines?

Raters called a convenience sample of 30 helplines and claimed to be alcohol, cocaine, heroin, marijuana or tobacco dependent persons seeking treatment. Responses were categorized as helpful, neutral or unhelpful. The median Kappa for agreement between pairs of raters rating a single call was 0.91. Between 36 and 78% of the helplines gave inconsistent responses to two calls giving the same scenario. Across the 346 calls, 43, 40 and 40% of responses to alcohol, cocaine and heroin scenarios were helpful and 28 and 25% of responses to tobacco and marijuana calls were helpful. These preliminary results indicate that much of the time responses to calls to national helplines are not consistent and not helpful.