RWJF - President's Message 2000

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    Fifth, we are working to integrate the most effective prevention and treatment strategies into the legal and medical systems. Our Board recently approved a new component of Join Together to foster policies at the national, state, and local levels that would expand treatment opportunities. The Board also approved a program aimed at expanding treatment for young people caught up in the juvenile justice system. Currently, there is little appropriate treatment in this system for youths with substance abuse problems. Working with juvenile court judges and communities, the program will develop new service delivery models that integrate comprehensive care into the juvenile justice system and promote community-based care for young offenders. We also have programs to help integrate smoking cessation efforts and techniques to address alcohol abuse into managed care settings.
    Our sixth approach is career development, which is at an earlier stage. SAPRP illustrates how a foundation can seed and grow a field. Although nearly a third of the investigators we have funded since 1997 had little or no prior experience in the field, about three out of four have reported that their SAPRP grant has lead to additional work in substance abuse policy.
    Now we are trying to build the field with two new programs. Developing Leadership in Reducing Substance Abuse is a program designed to attract and inspire new leaders to the field of substance abuse prevention; Innovators Combating Substance Abuse recognizes five senior researchers each year who have made significant contributions to the field.
    Together, these six strategies are intended to build an infrastructure of institutions and individuals that work at the national level, the community level, and across the two. They also work to provide evidence, examples, and a platform from which to highlight the problems of substance abuse and to bring prevention and treatment into the mainstream.

CHALLENGES
The main challenge for all of us is moving the issue of substance abuse onto the public agenda—getting policymakers, professionals, and the public to engage and make it a high priority. Why has it been so difficult to get people to care?
Certainly a significant factor is stigma—the certain distaste some have for working with people with addictions. We saw some of that at the Foundation when, early on, staff and trustees were not eager to take on the issue.
We also have a defining civil liberty/free choice ethos in this country that gives people the right to abuse themselves. And yet when people do that, we blame them for it and we are less inclined to help them.

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