The Opinions Essay: Why we should pay people to stay off drugs ~ INFO IMAGES

Special features, including long-form commentary and short films, to dive deeper into the news.

By Jen Balderama
Associate editor

What if someone were to tell you that right now, in the midst of the United States' staggering addiction crisis, there's a treatment available that shows great promise for helping people to stay off powerful stimulants such as meth?

What if you learned that this treatment has been shown to be much more effective than the usual 12-step programs — yet is vastly underused?

This is what Post Opinions fellow Emefa Addo Agawu discovered when she started digging into "contingency management," or CM, an incentive-based treatment that rewards people for abstaining from drug use.

"The way it works is straightforward," Emefa writes in her Opinions Essay. "When people pass a drug test, they earn rewards, usually a draw from a bowl containing prizes — written phrases of affirmation ('Good job!'), gift certificates in amounts from a few dollars to $50." As long as people stay abstinent, they keep winning prizes.

"To some, this all might sound a bit fishy," she writes. "Paying people to stay off drugs?" Yet it's a treatment that in many places has garnered bipartisan support — and for good reason, she says.

She discovered in the course of her reporting that the biggest obstacles to contingency management's wider adoption turn out not to be moral objection, but rather "a complicated mix of regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles." And she has concrete recommendations for what the federal government can do now to get more Americans into CM programs.

To tell this story, Emefa vividly traces the path of a young woman who struggled for years with addiction, and who finally enrolled in a CM program after learning she was pregnant and deciding she wanted a better life for herself and her infant daughter.

CM is not a silver bullet, Emefa notes. But it "just might change the lives of an untold number of Americans. And they should have the chance to find out whether it works for them."