Treatment response by primary drug of abuse: does methamphetamine make a difference?

The purposes of this study were to examine the outcomes of a sample of patients receiving publicly funded substance abuse treatment in Washington State and to compare the outcomes of those using methamphetamine (MA) with patients using other drugs of abuse. All data for this study came from administrative systems in Washington State, and the outcomes included completion of and readmission to treatment, employment, and various forms of criminal justice involvement. Treatment records were linked to outcome data using both deterministic and probabilistic matching techniques. Patients were tracked for 1 year following their discharge, and analyses were performed separately on a study population of adults and a study population of youth. For both adults and youth, the results showed that across outcomes, there were few differences between MA users and users of other hard drugs, whereas there were consistent differences between MA users and users of alcohol and marijuana. Alcohol and marijuana users tended to have more positive outcomes than the other groups. Future research should focus on more detailed analyses of the type of treatment received by patients, particularly for MA users.