Message From the Director

We are experiencing remarkably rapid advances in scientific understanding of the nature of drug abuse and addiction and what to do about them. These advances provide unprecedented opportunities to achieve NIDA's overarching goal: to significantly reduce the health and social consequences of drug abuse and addiction throughout the United States. They also provide the foundation for even greater advances in knowledge and its application, particularly as new and improved technologies, like those of molecular genetics and brain imaging, allow scientists to ask questions heretofore unimagined.

This document is a framework for our scientific future. Although this Strategic Plan is by no means comprehensive, it provides a three-pronged approach to illustrate how NIDA and its stakeholders (including Congress, NIDA's advisory groups and constituents, and members of the general public) foresee NIDA fulfilling its goal over the next 5 years. The Plan involves three fundamental strategies. The first is to provide communities with science-based tools to prevent drug abuse and addiction. This strategy includes NIDA's Vulnerability to Addiction Initiative, which has researchers working to understand the genetic and environmental risk and protective factors that make individuals more or less vulnerable to using drugs and to becoming addicted. Knowledge of those factors then will serve as a base for ever-improved prevention and treatment strategies.

The second strategy is to use scientific activities to improve the quality of drug abuse treatment nationwide. We have taken a giant step toward making this strategy a reality through the launching in 1999 of the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network. This Network provides a national treatment research and research dissemination infrastructure through which new behavioral and pharmacological therapies can be tested in a wide range of community-based treatment settings with broadly diverse patient populations.

The third strategy includes extensive efforts to educate the public about the true natureof drug abuse and addiction and what to do about them.

It cannot be overemphasized that a broad portfolio of fundamental research has been the foundation for past accomplishments and is the base upon which NIDA's future strategy is built. Basic science discoveries over the past two decades have consistently been the basis for virtually all the major advances in both clinical and applied drug abuse research. Thus, as in our first 25 years, NIDA will continue over the next 5 years to support and develop its broad and diverse research portfolio, ranging from studies of the molecule to analyses of managed care and drug courts.

NIDA remains committed to having science replace drug abuse and addiction ideology. We hope this Strategic Plan gives readers an increased understanding of how our research programs will actually help accomplish that aim.

Alan I. Leshner, Ph.D.