NTIES was a congressionally mandated, 5-year study of the impact of drug and alcohol treatment on thousands of clients in hundreds of treatment units that received public support from SAMHSA’s Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT).
NTIES inquired about the allocation of grant money to treatment programs to investigate what improvements were made with this funding and how many and what type of clients were affected by the grant awards. The NTIES project collected longitudinal data on a purposive sample of clients in treatment programs receiving CSAT demonstration grant funding.
Client-level data were obtained at treatment intake, at treatment exit, and 12 months after treatment exit. Service delivery unit (SDU) administrative and clinician (SDU staff) data were obtained at two time points, one year apart. Data were collected across several important outcome areas, including drug and alcohol use, physical and mental health, criminal activity, social functioning, and employment.
For a random sample of approximately half of those interviewed, urine specimens were collected at follow-up to corroborate clients' self-reports of substance misuse, in addition to arrest records to validate self-reports. Substances covered in the study included alcohol, analgesics, antianxiety medications, anticonvulsants, antidepressants, antimanics, barbiturates, cocaine (powder and crack), depressants, hallucinogens/psychedelics, heroin and other opiates, illegal methadone, inhalants, marijuana/hashish, methadone, methamphetamine/amphetamine and other stimulants, narcotics, and sedatives.