Center researchers will approach adolescent drug abuse on levels ranging from the individual to the social and cultural. They will integrate theories and methods from diverse areas including the neurobiology of memory, epidemiological analysis, clinical psychology, prevention science, social network analysis and cross-cultural research.
The center will be headquartered at the USC Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research (IPR).
"There are many complex reasons why someone becomes a drug abuser," says Alan W. Stacy, Ph.D., director and principal investigator of the newly funded center. "To understand them and to develop effective ways of preventing drug abuse among young people, our center will look at the problem from a wide range of scientific disciplines using a combination of theoretical approaches and research methods.
"To support this research and pave the way for future transdisciplinary research projects, an important part of our work will be to train investigators to reach out to, understand and incorporate approaches used by researchers in disciplines other than their own."
Stacy, associate professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School, and his team will conduct their studies over the next five years. "This grant to USC helps advance NIDA's National Drug Abuse Prevention Research Initiative designed to tap into the expertise of basic science researchers, prevention specialists, clinicians and health service researchers to collectively work toward the development of innovative approaches to reducing drug use nationwide," says Glen Hanson, Ph.D., D.D.S., acting director of NIDA.
Memory and Implicit Cognition
One of the center's two major studies will assess the effects of a nationally recognized drug-abuse prevention program-Project Towards No Drug Abuse-on memory associations and unconscious thought processes in high-risk teens.
This approach assumes that behavior, including drug use, is not just governed by rational decisions but also is influenced by triggers that activate certain links in an individual's unconscious or conscious memory. A drug user, for example, might suddenly develop a strong craving when he encounters someone with whom he used to get high. Such cravings, spontaneously evoked by memory triggers, may displace or compete with new conscious efforts to stay away from drugs.
Drug-use prevention researchers have rarely addressed these underlying thought processes, although they are consistent with findings from basic research in neurobiology, memory and learning. Understanding how best to apply associative memory processes to prevention is one of the major goals of this project.
Steve Sussman, Ph.D., professor of preventive medicine, is principal investigator of this study, which will include about 1,400 students 16 to 18 years old in continuation high schools in the Los Angeles area. Students of both genders include Caucasian, Latino, African-American and Asian/Pacific Island youth. Sussman, assisted by Stacy and others, developed the successful drug abuse prevention program under study in this project.
Sussman is co-principal investigator and co-director of the new drug abuse prevention research center.
Power of Peer Influence
The second major study will use a tool called social network analysis theory to determine if harnessing the power of peer influence can make an already proven drug prevention program-again Project Towards No Drug Abuse-more effective. For example, will a 14-year-old boy be better able to reject drugs if he learns assertiveness skills in a group filled with and directed by his peers-the same environment where he is likely to receive drug offers-than if he is placed in a group with randomly selected students under the direction of an adult teacher?
The study will assign 800 students in 46 continuation high school classrooms to receive the drug-prevention project's curriculum. Outcomes will be tested at one- and two-year intervals. Some of the students will participate in group activities directed by a teacher; others, in activities directed by student-selected peer leaders.
Researchers anticipate that the peer-led group will show less use of tobacco, marijuana, alcohol and hard drugs than the teacher-led group. Thomas W. Valente, Ph.D., associate professor of preventive medicine, is principal investigator of the project.
C. Anderson Johnson, Ph.D., leads the center's training core. Johnson, professor of preventive medicine and IPR director, is co-principal investigator and co-directs the new center.
This drug abuse prevention center grant is the second such grant that IPR has received from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research emphasizing the collaboration of investigators from various disciplines to explore substance abuse. In 1999, Johnson and colleagues received funding from NIDA and the National Cancer Institute, both part of the NIH, for the USC Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center, which studies tobacco use and prevention among ethnically diverse adolescents in California, Hawaii and China.