The Therapeutic Workplace Initiation Study

The primary purpose of the study is to determine if the central feature of the Therapeutic Workplace, the abstinence reinforcement contingency, is critical to initiate cocaine abstinence in injection drug using methadone patients who use cocaine consistently during methadone treatment. All subjects initially will be invited to attend the Therapeutic Workplace for an initial period, but abstinence will not be required to work during that time. During this initial period, vouchers will be contingent only on workplace attendance and performance on the training programs. Subjects (n=70) who attend the workplace consistently during the first 4 weeks of treatment, but who continue to use cocaine will be randomly assigned to a Work Only or an Abstinence Plus Work group. Subjects in the Work Only group will continue to be able to work independent of their urinalysis results. However, subjects in the Abstinence Plus Work group will be required to provide urine samples that show evidence of recent cocaine abstinence. Subjects in both groups will be invited to stay in the workplace for 6 months. We expect the subjects in the Abstinence and Work group will achieve higher rates of abstinence than the subjects in the Work Only group. This result would show that the abstinence reinforcement contingency (i.e., the requirement to provide cocaine-free urine samples to work and earn vouchers) is important in the initiation of abstinence in the study population.