GENDER DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN CRACK COCAINEABUSERS

Recent interest in women's health and patient-treatment matching has f ocused attention on gender differences among substance abusers. This a rticle seeks to extend research in this area to African-American crack cocaine abusers. It describes gender differences and similarities in a large sample (652 males and 595 females) of this important group of patients at a publicly funded, inner-city intensive outpatient clinic. As in previous studies on white working-class inpatients, few signifi cant gender differences mere found on demographic characteristics or d rug use or treatment histories. Moreover, there were few differences i n psychiatric symptomatology, and none in treatment participation or r etention. In contrast to some reports, we did not find that women ente red treatment with higher levels of depression than men. Most statisti cally significant differences we found were either too small to be of practical importance, or reflected conventional gender differences (e. g., women were more likely to care for dependents).