Recommendations for the President-elect

A blog entry by Mark Kleiman at UCLA summarizes his take on current issues in drug treatment, drug availability, and systems responses, including for adolescents. A couple of highlights:

• 9. Prevalence of diverted opioids and diverted stimulants among adolescents high and rising, with initiation at record levels. Little knowledge about how much damage this does; the pattern of peer-to-peer and internet distribution seems not to be generating problem drug markets or violence.
  
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• 22. Data gathering and analysis is a mess.
  • Almost all the money is spent on two big and very expensive annual surveys: NS-DUH (household) and Monitoring the Future (school-based), which give information about prevalence but not about problems.
    
  • ADAM, which was a cheap way to monitor drug use in the criminal-justice population, was shut down early in the decade. A proposal to do the same thing even more cheaply by relying on the drug tests done routinely on probationers and parolees never happened.
    
  • The DAWN system to measure drug-related emergency room visits and deaths has broken down.
    
  • The Community Epidemiology Work Group no longer collects original data.
    
  • The DEA Stride data set on drug prices and purities is no longer available for statistical analysis.