This proposal seeks funding for a Drug Abuse Prevention Research Center to be located at the University of Kentucky. The Center will bring together a multidisciplinary group of scholarly researchers and community practitioners to conduct research on drug abuse and prevention programs and to encourage the dissemination of findings in both academic and non-academic settings. The five individual projects proposed revolve around the theme that drug abuse needs to be studied and prevention programs designed for those at risk at different stages of the life course. The projects will make use of recent advances in study design and analytic strategies and will seek to introduce new innovations in the approach, analysis, and evaluation of drug abuse and prevention programs. Individual projects are concerned with biological models and studies directed at children, young adults, adults in the workplace, and the elderly. By expanding concerns beyond the existing bases of knowledge and focus on the initiation of drug use by school age youth, the Center seeks to increase the scope of possible prevention alternatives. The proposed research team at the University of Kentucky are in a strong position to create a drug prevention research center: a large multidisciplinary group of productive substance abuse researchers are present at UK; a wide range of areas of expertise are present; there is a good network of informal communication among these researchers; and there is strong institutional, community, and regional support for such a center. The Center would serve as the base for the requested project support, would associate other existing, pending and planned studies with its activities, would actively seek to initiate new areas of research, would work with other centers of drug abuse research, and would provide an academic and community forum for the communication of research findings, new programs, and the means of implementing and evaluating programs.
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