[Community reinforcement approach plus vouchers for cocaine dependence treatment]

Cocaine use is an increasingly serious problem in Spain. The absence of effective drugs for the treatment of cocaine addiction and of empirically validated therapy programmes makes it necessary to resort to programmes that have shown their effectiveness in other countries. The aim of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of one of the programmes that has obtained the best results in the United States: the Community Reinforcement Approach (CRA) Plus Vouchers for the treatment of cocaine addiction. We assessed treatment retention and dropout rates and cocaine use during the first three months of intervention. The sample was made up of 37 patients addicted to cocaine who were assigned at random to one of two conditions: experimental (CRA Plus Vouchers) or control (Standard Treatment), both in the outpatient context. The results showed that 85.7% of the experimental group patients completed 12 weeks of treatment, compared to 69.6% of the control group. In the experimental group, 57.1% of the patients maintained continuous abstinence, compared to 39.1% of the control group. These results coincide with those of previous studies, all from outside Spain. Nevertheless, longer-term studies with larger samples are necessary in order to confirm the effectiveness of this program.