Drug Abuse Treatment Efforts of the National Institute on Drug Abuse

A followup review was conducted to assess the progress of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in solving problems identified earlier. NIDA administers a comprehensive program of drug abuse treatment services for almost one million persons each year. NIDA funds are provided through a slot funding concept. One slot can be defined as the capability to treat one abuser for a 12-month period. The slot funding mechanism does not provide an incentive for a provider or a State to raise the slot utilization rate, however, because NIDA pays its full share of slot costs regardless of a program's utilization rate. On the other hand, State officials complained that treatment costs are higher than the NIDA slot cost ceiling. It was found that clients received, on the average, less than 30 minutes a week of counseling, whereas a minimum of 3 hours of formalized counseling per week was to be made available to each patient under NIDA funding criteria. Although the State licensing requirement of drug abuse treatment facilities has been repealed, NIDA encourages the States to develop treatment standards and providers to seek Joint Commission accreditation. It is suggested that NIDA needs to develop and implement a mechanism that will be an improvement over the slot funding mechanism; for example, under the service concept mechanism, programs may be reimbursed for the actual cost of service provided to the drug abuser.