Part of this whole NIDA Clinical Trials Network, as part of the same initiative, they put out a request for proposals looking for what they called "community- friendly" proposals because people have developed a lot of behavioral treatments that nobody used. So they said, "If you’ve developed a new treatment that you think might be difficult to implement in a real world, substance abuse treatment setting, we invite you to modify it so that it’s more implementable."

So I talked to some people who ran community treatment programs, and they told me that there were two components of IGT that would make it more difficult to implement. One was that it was twenty weeks, and as one person told me, “No one will pay us to do twenty weeks of anything, but we can get paid for twelve weeks of something." So I switched it from twenty weeks to twelve weeks because if you can’t get paid to do something then you’re probably not going to do it. So that was one modification.

Then the other is that most of the people that were running IGT in the initial trial knew something about cognitive behavioral therapy, which was the overall model, and bipolar disorder. And many people who are counselors in drug abuse treatment programs know relatively little about cognitive behavioral therapy or bipolar disorder.

And so the question was, could this treatment be run by front-line drug counselors who aren't trained in either of these things, or who had minimal training in those things compared to the people who had run it before?

So we replicated this study using drug counselors, and it’s just finishing now. And we’re doing the finishing touches on analyzing the data. But they did essentially as well as the other folks, and we found the difference, again, between IGT and group drug counseling very similar differences to the previous study. And so they could. They were trained, and they did the treatment well.