Facilitating the adoption of contingency management for the treatment of substance use disorders.

Contingency management (CM) is an effective treatment strategy for addressing many types of substance abuse disorders and associated problems. Nonetheless, CM protocols have not been widely embraced by community-based treatment providers. Exploration of the viability of CM outside of a research context remains largely an academic pursuit. In this article, several areas are outlined that may hinder the transfer of CM technology into community-based practice settings, the literature addressing these barriers is reviewed, and suggestions are offered to researchers for overcoming them.

The National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network studies about CM (protocols CTN-0006 and CTN-0007, Motivational Incentives for Enhanced Drug Abuse Recovery (MIEDAR)) are discussed as an example of supportive evidence that community-based drug abuse treatment providers can produce meaningful improvements in treatment efficacy by adopting CM procedures.

Related protocols: CTN-0006, CTN-0007