Abstinence in treated and untreated opiate abusers: a study of a prison sample.

This paper highlighted the importance of questions relating to the natural history of opiate addiction in the evaluation of addiction treatment programmes. Out of a systematic sample of 95 Mountjoy prisoners, 24 were found to be have been daily users of opiates. Half of these had been abstinent before entering prison for a mean of 17.5 months. The author found, however, that 11 of the total 24 subjects and seven of 12 abstinent prisoners had not been exposed to any treatment other than detoxification. The author suggested these results indicated the need for further investigation into the benefits of treatment programmes and whether they dealt with addicts who were significantly different from the addicts who avoided treatment. He also suggested the need for research into the so-called spontaneous remission, to identify and describe the personal factors which act to promote or inhibit self-controlled abstinence from drugs