Community Outreach with Active Drug Users: The Detroit Experience

Out-of-treatment drug users are hard to reach. Outreach using indigenous outreach workers introduces appropriate and targeted interventions in an effort to slow the spread of HIV within drug-using networks. A project in Detroit, Michigan, part of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Cooperative Agreement (CA) Project, demonstrated some innovative strategies to reach, recruit, retain, and follow up active drug-using participants in a randomized clinical trial research project.