NCJ Number
176004
Journal
Compiler Volume: 17 Issue: 3 Dated: January 1998 Pages: 14-16
Date Published
1998
Length
3 pages
Annotation
This article provides an overview of the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program and its predecessor, the Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) study, as they have operated in Illinois over the past 10 years.
Abstract
DUF was an outgrowth of pretrial drug-testing programs in Washington, D.C., and New York. The program was recently replaced by the ADAM program and is now operating in 35 major cities across the Nation. In Illinois, the program is administered by the Chicago-based Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities (TASC). Although ADAM/DUF calls for the collection of self- reported information on drug use and other issues, TASC has been cautious in Chicago in using and analyzing the self-reported data. This is because prior work that compared the urinalysis results with self-reported recent drug use has shown that as many as 50 percent of the arrestees who tested positive for a given drug denied having used that drug within the past 2 days. The data presented in this article are restricted to the urinalysis results obtained from Chicago arrestees. The urinalysis data collected in July 1997, the most recent quarter for which data were available, show that approximately 80 percent of the arrestees sampled tested positive for use of some illicit drug, including marijuana, within 48 hours of their arrest. When marijuana is excluded, 56 percent of the arrestees continued to test positive. About 50 percent of these arrestees tested positive for cocaine, and approximately 50 percent for marijuana. One-quarter of the sample tested positive for opiates. The most remarkable characteristic of the results for this quarter is how typical they have become over the 10 years of administering ADAM/DUF in Chicago. The ADAM/DUF data show that for a significant segment of the Chicago population, crime and illegal drug use continue to be intractable parts of the fabric of their daily lives. 1 figure