Director's Report to the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse
May, 2002
Planned Meetings
Drs. Kathy Etz from DESPR, Minda Lynch and Cora Lee Wetherington from DNBR, and Suman Rao from OSPC are organizing a meeting on Proximal Processes in the Decision to Abuse Drugs for July 19, 2002 at the Bethesda Marriott. The participants will focus their discussion on: the cognition/emotion interface in adolescent development; neurobiological processes in cortical and subcortical emotional areas that are important for this interface; contextual factors at the time of decisions to abuse drugs; the adolescent's perception of risk; and role of risk calculation and value estimation as proximal processes in these decisions. Recommendations for future field and laboratory-based investigation on proximal processes will be entertained, and attention will be given to methodological considerations and behavioral assessment strategies.
A meeting entitled Nonconscious Processes in Self-regulation: Application to Drug Abuse and Addiction is planned for July 22-23, 2002. The meeting, to be held at NIDA, will bring together experts on automaticity in self-regulation with drug abuse researchers who have explored automaticity as a paradigm for compulsive drug use. Participants include Timothy Baker, Roy Baumeister, Tanya Chartrand, Stephen Woods among others. The meeting is designed to assist in the development of the social cognition research portfolio at NIDA.
Drs. Steven Grant and Joseph Frascella, DTR&D, are members of the organizing committee for a NIDA-sponsored meeting on Youth, Internet, and Drugs, to be held June 6, 2002 in Bethesda, MD.
CAMCODA staff, working with NIDA grantees and other individuals and organizations, developed seven proposals for satellite sessions for the XIV International AIDS Conference, to be held in July 2002, in Barcelona, Spain. All of the sessions were approved, and include: 1) Youth Drug Abuse and HIV Infection in Cultural Context; 2) Impact of Health Disparities on HIV Interventions in Drug-Using Populations; 3) Drug Abuse Treatment as HIV Prevention; 4) Effects of Drug Abuse and Sex Work on HIV Prevention Across National Borders; 5) HIV Risk Among Transgenders: The Social and Cultural Context of Substance Abuse; 6) Clarifying the Controversy About Whether Drug Abuse Influences AIDS Progression; and 7) the Global Research Network on HIV Prevention in Drug-Using Populations. An eighth session, on Psychostimulant Abuse and HIV Risk, was submitted by Dr. Frank Vocci, Director of NIDA's Division of Treatment Research and Development, and was approved.
National CTN Steering Committee Meetings are planned for the follow dates and locations: August 12-14, 2002, in Seattle, Washington; and October 21-24, 2002, in Bethesda, Maryland.
The CTN Data and Safety Monitoring Board will meet, July 22-23, 2002, and October 10-11, 2002, in Bethesda, Maryland.
The CTN Protocol Review Board will meet August 20, 2002, and November 5, 2002, in Bethesda, Maryland.
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