Substance Abuse Continued use of research

Continued use of research in professional life:

Stable housing for substance abusers

Substance abuse is strongly correlated with a wide array of risky behaviors, including a failure to live in some form of stable housing, as well as high-risk sexual behaviors. This is significant, because stable housing situations in the form of rehabilitation centers or 'halfway' homes are often used as bases of treatment for addicts. However, a review of the existing literature indicates that simply providing housing for addicts should not be regarded as a panacea or as an automatic form of treatment for addiction. In fact, the results are mixed regarding a correlation between substance abuse and the ability to obtain stable housing. For the purposes of this review, a definition of 'stable housing' will be defined as "not having lived on the street" versus "living in a shelter or single room occupancy hotel (SRO)" at any time in the past 6 months (Des Jarlais 2007).

Literature review

According to Palepu (et al. 2010), "unstable housing and homelessness is prevalent among injection drug users (IDU)" and finding a stable housing situation is often a critical component of drug treatment for substance abusers. However, in a study of 992 intravenous drug uses, "exposure to addiction treatment" and "the attainment of stable housing among participants who were homeless or living in single room occupancy (SRO) hotels…was negatively associated with attaining stable...

This caused the authors of the study to surmise that the most effective housing placement was actually occurring outside of addiction treatment.
Thus, surprisingly, addiction treatment was associated with persons less likely to have found stable housing, despite the clear intent of most treatment programs to introduce a more stable life situation for participants. Drawing upon these findings, it seems probable that addicts only seek treatment after addiction has had an extremely negative impact upon their life situation, and has made them less likely to be employable and able to fit into society. Even after addiction treatment, these 'hardened' addicts still struggled with finding housing, more so than addicts with 'less' treatment. This clearly reflects the tendency towards recidivism within most substance abuse programs. The results point to a larger goal for addiction treatment as a whole: rather than simply focusing upon attempting to find stable housing for hardened addicts, also focusing upon treating addicts before their situation has had a negative impact upon their housing situation and their ability to hold a job is the wider policy is wise.

The suggestion that addiction treatment is negatively associated with the ability to find stable housing does not mean that improving addicts' housing situation is still not a laudable goal, though. According to Des Jarlais (2007) in a study of substance abusers…