Faith healing

Public Interest, Spring, 2004 by Joseph Loconte

Drug free?

As with prison outreach programs, researchers are paying more attention to faith-based rehabilitation. The data are not as robust as the Prison Fellowship studies, but they still support the claim that religious approaches such as Teen Challenge help addicts recover in ways that secular therapies do not. The figure deserving the most attention is this: Each year about 2,700 confirmed drug abusers complete a Teen Challenge program drug free and are ready for full-time work. What is more, most of them appear to stay that way for a long time.

The first independent survey of Teen Challenge participants was funded in 1977 by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and was conducted by Catherine Hess, a former narcotics coordinator for New York City. Upon interviewing individuals seven years after they joined programs in Brooklyn and Rehrersburg, Pennsylvania, Hess found that 67 percent of Teen Challenge graduates had remained drug free--that is, they had abstained from narcotics, marijuana, alcohol, and cigarettes. Most were employed or in school. "It appears reasonable to conclude," says Hess, "that involvement with Teen Challenge is associated with dramatic changes in behavior for a substantial number of heroin users." Nevertheless, Hess acknowledges the study had several significant limitations, including a high dropout rate: Although 335 volunteers entered the initial detoxification phase in Brooklyn, only 64 individuals continued the regimen in the Rehrersburg program and completed their residential stay. It's also unclear what other factors may have influenced participants in the seven years following their completion of the program.

More important, however, is a recent comparative study of Teen Challenge graduates completed by Aaron Bicknese as his doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University. It is one of the most methodologically rigorous studies to date of faith-based treatment programs. Bicknese collected hour-long interviews with 59 program graduates, drawing on post-treatment cohorts of 12 months, 18 months, and 24 months. He minimized the problem of selection bias by including questions about the person's church background. His comparison group was a short-term secular program that also made abstinence from drug use its primary goal. The two groups were matched based on five variables: gender, ethnicity, age, severity of pretreatment addiction, and court-referral status. Dropout rates were also about equal. Bicknese admits that low response rates from Teen Challenge and the comparison group (39 percent and 30 percent, respectively) indicate the need for a larger dataset before broad conclusions can be drawn. But his findings are still significant.

Before joining Teen Challenge, about 58 percent of the participants used cocaine regularly; after completing the regimen, about 10 percent used the drug. For the comparison group, the number dropped from 46 percent to 16 percent. Marijuana use was cut from 49 percent to 3 percent among Teen Challenge graduates, but the reduction was only 37 to 15 percent for the secular group. Not surprisingly, when asked to give their reasons for quitting drugs, most Teen Challenge graduates mentioned Jesus or God.