Understanding the Demand for Illegal Drugs (2010) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
5 Findings and Research Recommendations
5 Findings and Research Recommendations
Pages 89-106
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From page 89... ...
. In this chapter we offer recommendations for data collection and research activities, both epidemiology and treatment research, that might enable the government to respond effectively to the continued demand for illegal drugs.
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From page 90... ...
, few of the recommendations of the 2001 committee report have been implemented. In this report we repeat and emphasize some of those previous recommen dations, and we supplement them by providing specific comments on individual datasets that are critical to assessing the determinants of the demand for illegal drugs.
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From page 91... ...
Some of these improvements reflect the need to implement recommendations offered in the previous National Research Council (2001) report, Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don't Know Keeps Hurting Us.
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From page 92... ...
NSDUH was designed and is mainly used to provide descriptive information on basic trends and correlates of illegal drug use. Both policy analysis and social science research require the ability to systematically link such data with a rich set of variables regarding personal circumstances, public policies, and individual encounters with social service systems.
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From page 93... ...
National surveys of treatment facilities, including TEDS, the National Drug Abuse Treatment System Survey (NDATSS) , and the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services, were mainly developed and designed to explore service delivery issues in substance abuse treatment.
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From page 94... ...
It is conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan, with funding from NIDA at the National Institutes of Health. For the past 8 years, it has been the principal indicator for the federal government in assessing the suc cess of the federal drug strategy in reducing illegal drug use, particularly for adolescent substance use.
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From page 95... ...
. However, the possibility of obtaining access to the MTF panel data is only mentioned on the ICPSR/SAMHDA web page cited above in an answer to a Frequently Asked Question (Is the longitudinal data available for Monitoring the Future?
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From page 96... ...
Given the unique value of these MTF panel data, the committee endorses the recommendation of the previous National Research Council (2001) committee that NIDA create an advisory panel to work with the grantee on issues of data access, in particular to foster additional aware ness about methods of providing access that will meet the needs of the research field.
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From page 97... ...
The committee recommends that the U.S. Department of Justice reinstitute an Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring-like survey to col lect data on the behavior of criminally involved drug users.
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From page 98... ...
Treatment Episode Data System Although TEDS was originally developed as an administrative dataset, as noted above it has become an increasingly valuable research tool in understanding changing patterns of illegal drug use. The quality of the data appears to have improved in recent years, and it provides a large-sample dataset about the circumstances of people who enter sub stance abuse treatment.
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From page 99... ...
The need for such data is increasingly pressing, given the absence of recent cohort studies comparable to prior efforts, such as the National Treatment Improvement and Evaluation Study. The earlier prominent cohort studies are more than a decade old and thus do not address some important contemporary questions, including trajectories of drug use and offending among methamphetamine users and changing patterns of marijuana and prescription drug abuse.
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From page 100... ...
-- that could be added to ongoing longitudinal cohort studies. Virtually all existing longitudinal studies already ask participants about illegal, nonmedical, and extra-medical drug use in some depth.
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From page 101... ...
Existing longitudinal cohort studies whose participants have reached adulthood with good retention rates tend to represent specific cities or states. Good longitudinal sample retention is essential for model ling drug demand, because substance use is associated with nonresponse, and high rates of nonresponse characterize many contemporary surveys and make them problematic for ascertaining drug demand (see e.g., Galea and Tracy, 2007)
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From page 102... ...
Studies of within-individual change can take one step toward building an evidence base on causal factors by using indi vidual drug users as their own controls, linking decreasing drug use to antecedent events while all other characteristics of the drug users remain constant. Longitudinal studies of adult twins (such as the Vietnam-Era Twin Study)
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From page 103... ...
We have not found any MTF longitudinal analyses that inform economic or drug demand models, although the data are a national resource that could be exploited to track within-individual change in drug use over long-term study periods and to identify the correlates and suspected causal determinants of such change. Even if the MTF panels are not accessible to outside researchers, we urge grantee research groups to explore these data more deeply.
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From page 104... ...
The goal of such improvements in the quality of treatment is to make drug desistence a more certain and reliable outcome of a given treatment episode or of cumulative treatment episodes which will, in turn, stimulate further demand reduction. The committee recommends that drug abuse treatment provid ers adopt new practices with research conducted to examine effectiveness.
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From page 105... ...
. What America's Users Spend on Illegal Drugs, -000.
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