ANN ARBOR—The Monitoring the Future Study at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR) received a five-year, $23 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to continue annual surveys of smoking, drinking and illicit drug use by American young people.

Started in 1975, the study provides information on national usage patterns and attitudes of eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students, as well as college students and young adults.

Monitoring the Future principal investigator Lloyd D. Johnston and ISR colleagues Jerald Bachman, Patrick O’Malley, and John Schulenberg also received a new five-year, $7 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to evaluate how various policies, practices and programs affect teen substance use.

As part of the new Adolescent Substance Abuse Policies and Programs (ASAPP) Study, the U-M team will conduct rapid response surveys in 100 secondary schools before the implementation of new policies and programs, such as raising the price of cigarettes, reducing underage access to cigarettes or alcohol, or introducing new prevention programs into schools. The schools in the ongoing Monitoring the Future Study will provide comparison data.

“Monitoring the Future has played an important role in putting the problems of adolescent smoking and illicit drug use back on the national agenda in the ’90s,” says Johnston. “Now, with a lot of new programs and policy initiatives aimed at these problems, it will be important to determine which are working and which are not.” The Monitoring the Future Study has already assessed such major policy interventions as the impact of marijuana decriminalization during the 1970s, and the impact of raising the drinking age in the 1980s. Currently, the U-M team is evaluating how California’s Proposition 215, which legalizes the medical use of marijuana, has affected teen tobacco, alcohol and illicit drug use.

Robert Wood Johnson FoundationU-M News and Information ServicesUniversity of Michigan