NIDA - Five Year Strategic Plan - Bringing the Power of Science to Bear on Drug Abuse and Addiction

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The Science of Drug Abuse and Addiction from the National Institute on Drug Abuse

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	Bringing the Power of Science to Bear on Drug Abuse and Addiction - Five Year Strategic Plan (2000-2005)

NIDA Strategic Plan

Five-Year Goal To Significantly Reduce Drug Abuse and Addiction and Their Behavioral, Health, and Social Consequences

Strategy 1 Give communities science-based tools to prevent drug abuse and addiction.	Strategy 2 Develop and distribute tools to improve the quality of drug abuse treatment nationwide.	Strategy 3 Educate the public about drug abuse and addiction.
Understand genetic and environmental risk and protective factors. Enhance assessment of drug problems at the local level. Translate prevention principles for communities. Determine the link between drug use and infectious diseases.	Translate basic neurobiological and behavioral research into new treatments. Ensure that science-based treatments are translated to community settings. Bring scientific methods to the examination of community-based treatments for addiction. Understand the medical consequences of drug abuse and use that knowledge to develop new treatments.	Develop science-based educational materials presenting research findings and their implications in plain English. Disseminate materials broadly to reach as wide an audience as possible with information that is useful, usable, and used.

Increase Understanding of the Nature of Addiction Through Basic and Clinical Research.

Five-Year Goal: To Significantly Reduce Drug Abuse and Addiction and Their Behavioral, Health, and Social Consequences

NIDA's overarching goal for the next 5 years is to significantly reduce the health and social consequences of drug abuse and addiction. Using input from Congress, the Institute's staff, its advisory groups, and its constituents, NIDA has developed three broad strategies and several priority areas within each that it will pursue to fulfill this goal. Successfully enacting these strategies, and promoting the priority areas, will ultimately rely on NIDA's most important tool - its ability to promote and conduct cutting-edge research, including basic, clinical, epidemiological, and services research, aimed at developing practical treatments, prevention strategies, and educational efforts to address the problems of drug addiction and abuse.

For the past 25 years, NIDA has funded a wide range of basic research endeavors aimed at answering fundamental questions such as:

What are the root causes of drug addiction?
Why do people take the risk of using illicit drugs?
What factors predispose someone to use and then become addicted to drugs?
What factors protect against initial drug use turning into drug abuse and addiction?
How does the transition from drug abuse to addiction occur?
What biochemical and behavioral effects do drugs produce, both short-term and long-term?
What impact does drug abuse have upon racial and ethnic minorities?

To answer these questions, research on drug abuse and addiction must cross many scientific, social, and cultural boundaries, and it must be transferred from the laboratory to the clinic to the community and back again. For example, our ability to improve the effectiveness of drug abuse prevention and treatment depends on our understanding the underlying neurobiology of addiction as well as the biological, genetic, social, psychological, and environmental factors that predispose individuals to drug addiction.

In addition, NIDA must ensure that the infrastructure is in place to successfully advance its research efforts. This includes providing the resources necessary to train a broad-based, diverse cadre of researchers to lead the Nation's research efforts.

The NIDA research portfolio has already produced important new treatment and prevention strategies, and it will continue paying dividends to society in at least two major ways. First, specific accomplishments that generate new insights into drug abuse and addiction will continue, producing new treatments for drug addiction and even better prevention methods, and enabling us to disseminate new information to the community and general public. However, just as important, scientific research and clinical experience will continue to teach us much about what really matters in addiction and where we need to concentrate both research and policy efforts.

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The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) , a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Questions? See our Contact Information. Last updated on Tuesday, July 15, 2008.