Preventing Harmful Substance Use: The evidence base for policy and practice

The prevention of harm from drug use, both legal and illegal, is a major concern to government departments and clinicians throughout the world. Recently, much new research has been conducted regarding global levels and patterns of drug-related harm, on common risk factors with other social problems (e.g. mental health, crime) and on the effectiveness of wide range of intervention strategies. There is a need to summarise and synthesise this new knowledge for use in a range of disciplines. Preventing Harmful Substance Use offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date advice available on the prevention of drug and alcohol abuse. Contributors provide authoritative, science-based reviews of knowledge on their areas of expertise, and make clear recommendations for the future of prevention policy and practice. A final section draws the work together and offers a framework for an integrated science of prevention.

Paul J. Gruenewald is a Senior Research Scientists and Scientific Director of Prevention Research Center (PRC) in Berkeley, California, a division of the US-based Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE). Research at PIRE is funded by grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, and other national, state, local and private funding agencies. Dr Gruenewald is Principal Investigator of a Center grant funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to study "Environmental Approaches to Prevention" (P60-AA906282) and a Merit award recipient for his studies of "Alcohol Outlets and Violence" (R37-AA912927). He is currently also Director of the PIRE-based Spatial Systems Group, a group that focuses on ecological studies of alcohol-and drug-related problems. He has published widely in the areas of alcohol policy and community prevention. He is well known for his application of rigorous mathematical and statistical approaches to the analysis of community level problems related to alcohol use, drugs and crime.

Wendy Loxley is an Associate Professor at the National Drug Research Institute, at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia, where she has been employed for fifteen years. Much of her early research career was concerned with addressing the risk of blood-borne viruses to Australian injecting drug users, and she has been involved in a number of large quantitative and smaller qualitative studies exploring this issue. Other research experiences include monitoring illicit drug use among police detainees, the evaluation of community-based approaches to drug law enforcement, and the use of testing and vaccination to prevent hepatitis C and other blood-borne viruses among injectors. She was selected by the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing to lead the evaluation of the Community Partnerships Initiative which was aimed at the development of community-based approaches to primary prevention of illicit drug use in young people. More recently, she was the first principal investigator on a commission for the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing which undertook a major literature review of the evidence relating to the prevention of drug use, risk and harm in Australia, She is the first author of the two volumes-Monograph and Summary-which have recently been published from this work.

Tim Stockwell is currently Director of the Centre for Addictions Research of BC, Canada, and, until mid-2004, was Director of Australia's National Drug Research Institute based at Curtin University in Western Australia. He recently co-edited the critically acclaimed Wiley book International Handbook of Alcohol Dependence and Problems with Nick Heather and Tim Peters. he has published widely in the field of addiction studies and has particular expertise in the areas of alcohol and other drug epidemiology and prevention policy. He was Regional Editor for Australasia of the International Journal Addiction for six years. He was until recently a member of Australia's National Expert Advisory Committee on Alcohol, a Director of Australia's Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation and member of the World Health Organization's Alcohol Policy and Strategy Advisory Committee. He obtained his first degree in Psychology and Philosophy at Oxford University, a Master's degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Surrey and a doctorate at the Institute of Psychiatry, the University of London.

John Winston Toumbourou is Associate Professor at the Department of Pediatrics, University of Melbourne, and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Adolescent Health, within the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. John is a founding member and the past Chair of the College of Health Psychologists within the Australian Psychological Society. He is a Principal Investigator on a number of studies investigating healthy youth development, including the Australian Temperament Project (investigating the role of childhood temperament and behaviour in the prediction of adolescent substance use, delinquency and depression), and the International Youth Development study (a collaborative longitudinal study with the Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington). John has been involved in the development of a number of youth health promotion programmes including the Chronic Illness Peer Support Program (Victorian Public Health Award 1999), the Behaviour Exchange Systems Training Program (targeting families experiencing youth substance abuse), Program for Parents (a national youth suicide prevention programme demonstrating success in reducing early youth delinquency and substance use) and Communities that Care (a community mobilisation programme targeting crime prevention and substance abuse Prevention). John has been prominent in developing literature reviews and policy recommendations relevant to developmental prevention through the Victorian Premier's Drug Prevention Council Drug Info Clearinghouse and within the consortium that produced the recent Prevention Monograph summarising the evidence base for the Australian Commonwealth Government's Prevention Agenda.