What Are the %’S of People Who Return to Drugs After Rehabilitation?

Most relapse and most rehabs lie about it, using “followup studies”. They kick some of the people that they think won’t make it so that they do not show up in their followups, they call people who finished the program and ask if they are still sober. So many things wrong with that, some lie and most of the people they can’t get hold of are the ones that relapse, not the ones that can manage to hang onto the same phone number.

Many sources can be found here:
The Effectiveness of the Twelve-Step Treatment
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-effectiveness.html

The Problem With Statistics:
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-statistics.html

One person asked, “When AA/NA or a particular rehab center claims an X% ‘success rate’ what exactly does that mean? I have seen some places boast 85-90%.”

There are at least a couple of answers:

Basically, what they do is: Just ignore everybody who fails or drops out or is kicked out of their program early. “They don’t count because they didn’t complete the program,” the counselors say. That conveniently eliminates all of the failures, relapsers, and dropouts from the statistics. That produces numbers that are as biased as can be, of course. It isn’t the successful abstainers who drop out of the programs; it’s the people for whom the program was no help and are relapsing. The treatment centers are just engaging in some more Enron-style accounting. They create the illusion of great success by hiding all of their failures “off of the books”.
So if 100 people start the program, and at the end there are 10 left who actually graduate, and 8 of them are still clean and sober a month later, then the treatment center claims an 80% success rate.

The treatment centers also almost never do longer-term follow-ups, like checking to see how many of their clients are still sober and drug-free a year after graduation. If the treatment centers ever did that, they would discover that their real success rate was nothing more than the usual rate of spontaneous remission.

It seems to me that all of those treatment centers are guilty of criminal fraud and false advertising. Why doesn’t someone sue and sic the Fair Trade Commission on them?

Cora Finch gave this answer:

It comes down to two things, baseline and outcome. Both can be defined in a variety of ways, or left undefined.
The “best” numbers come from studies with the highest baseline. Take highly-paid professionals who have had a DIU and get a lot of hangovers. In 1940 they would have been considered ordinary people. But now we can count them as alcoholics and put them in a diversion program with the threat of losing their jobs and — Wow, what a success rate!
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-effectiveness.html#AA_numbers