The idea of offering meaningful incentives to influence and change adult behavior is slowly catching on for drug and alcohol treatment, according to this Knight Ridder article. More than 60 studies in this country and Europe show that rewarding substance abusers for staying clean helps keep them enrolled in the critical early weeks of outpatient rehab, when dropout rates can hit 40 percent or more. "Many of us recognize this as one of the most important and effective tools we have," said Charles R. Schuster, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse under Presidents Reagan and Bush and now head of addictions research at the Wayne State University School of Medicine. The article ran in dozens of Knight Ridder newspapers around the country.