Pathways to heroin abstinence: a longitudinal study of urban black youth.

Reported here is a study of the effectiveness of treatment in reducing the duration of heroin careers, with a special focus on gender differences. The longitudinal research is based on a community representative sample of urban black youth, ages 18-23, and utilizes a recently introduced statistical methodology, event-history analysis. Simple hazard probability analysis confirmed that males and females did not differ significantly in their cumulative probabilities of abstinence from heroin. The more elaborated event-history model demonstrated, however, that treatment played a significantly different role among young men and women in attaining abstinence. While a man's likelihood of abstinence was but marginally greater with treatment than without it, women's likelihood of abstinence was significantly increased by entering treatment.