The Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) system evolved from the Drug Use Forecasting program (DUF). The National Institute of Justice developed this monitoring system in 1987 (Wish and Gropper, 1990). DUF was developed on the premise that a large fraction of arrestees not arrested for drug crimes (such as the possession or sale of drugs) were drug users, and that their drug use was linked to their criminality. Although many indicators were available to assess the level and nature of the nation's drug-abuse problem, little reliable data was available for arrestees, a particularly high-risk group in this regard. By 1989 the DUF program included twenty-fourcities.

DUF protocol called for the collection of interview and urinalysis data from arrestees. In each city, a goal of interviewing 225 adult male and 100 adult female arrestees each quarter was set. Initially, no more than 20 percent of those included...