Epidemiology of Drug Abuse

• Natural History of Drug Abusing Behaviors.- Defining and Measuring Drug Abusing Behaviors.- Drug Abuse Heterogeneity and the Search for Subtypes.- Studying the Natural History of Drug Use.- Health, Social, and Psychological Consequences of Drug Use and Abuse.- Epidemiological Methods.- Use of Archival Data.- Sampling Issues in Drug Epidemiology.- Collecting Drug Use Data from Different Populations.- Indirect Methods to Estimate Prevalence.- Qualitative Methods in the Drug Abuse Field.- Ethical Considerations for Drug Abuse Epidemiologic Research.- Descriptive and Analytic Epidemiologic Studies.- A Common Language for a Common Problem: The Developing Role of Drug Epidemiology in a Global Context.- Longitudinal Studies of Drug Use and Abuse.- Drug Abuse and the Spread of Infection: HIV and AIDS as an Example.- Epidemiologic Information and Demand Reduction.- Implications of Epidemiologic Information for Effective Drug Abuse Prevention Strategies.- The Role of Treatment Data in Studying the Epidemiology of Substance Use and Abuse.

"Many who promote a demand-reduction philosophy for solving the nation's substance abuse policy cite a disparity between the funding levels for interdiction versus those for demand-reduction activities. In part, the disparity can be attributed to an ability of the interdiction side to quantify its needs and its successes. Epidemiology may be the best tool at our disposal for decreasing this level-of-resource disparity by leading the field toward more quantification- and evidence-based interventions. Sloboda's work may help to accomplish this very worthy goal." James M. Topolski, Ph.D., from PsycCritiques, April 12, 2006, Vol. 51 (15), Article 9