1. Economic evaluation of substance abuse treatment programs aims to assess costs and benefits in order to improve effectiveness and rationalize resource allocation. 2. Key aspects of economic evaluation include measuring treatment costs using tools like DATCAP and measuring outcomes using tools like ASI to assess areas like criminal behavior, employment, and health service use. 3. Benefits are converted to monetary values and compared to costs to calculate cost-benefit ratios and net benefits to understand the monetary gains from investments in reducing crime, improving health, and reducing costs to the justice system.