Background: The Alcohol, Smoking and Substance Involvement Screening Test (ASSIST) was developed to detect substance use disorders.

Aims: The objective of the present study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the French version of ASSIST in various clinical groups with different levels of substance use.

Methods: 150 subjects were recruited from clients attending primary health care, psychiatric and addiction treatment facilities. Measures included ASSIST, Addiction Severity Index (ASI), Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI-Plus), Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) and Revised Fagerstrom Tolerance Questionnaire-Smoking (RTQ).

Results and conclusion: Concurrent validity was demonstrated by significant correlations between ASSIST scores and scores from ASI, AUDIT and RTQ, as well as significantly greater ASSIST scores for patients with a MINI-Plus diagnosis of abuse or dependence. The ASSIST questionnaire was found to have high internal consistency for the total substance involvement as well as for specific substance involvement as assessed with Cronbach’s α, ranging from 0.74 to 0.93. When possibly computed, ASSIST cutoff scores have interesting sensitivity and specificity for discrimination between use and abuse and between abuse and dependence. The findings demonstrated that the French version of ASSIST is a valid screening test for identifying substance use disorders in various health care settings, including psychiatric settings.