UMaine Partners with State to Create Substance Abuse Center
Contact: Stephen Gilson, (207) 581-2409, Liz DePoy, (207) 581-1469, George Manlove, (207) 581-3756
ORONO-The UMaine Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies has received $650,000 to create a Prevention Center of Excellence on the Orono campus to study what is needed in Maine to prevent substance abuse and its consequences.
The project is a result of a cooperative agreement between the Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies (CCIDS) and the state Office of Substance Abuse, which is administering a five-year grant awarded by SAMSHA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration).
“The intent is to look at substance abuse for adolescents in the state of Maine,” says Stephen Gilson, principal investigator and professor of interdisciplinary disability studies. “What does it mean and what doesn’t it mean for different adolescents? In addition to asking questions, we’ll also look at the environments–the media, music, social, academic and virtual environments.”
The new center will identify communities in Maine that are underserved by existing substance abuse prevention programs and will provide the information necessary to craft prevention strategies relevant to these communities, according to Gilson and Liz DePoy, professor and coordinator of interdisciplinary disability studies at the CCIDS.
In addition to DePoy and Gilson, who has done post-doctoral work at the National Institute of Drug Abuse, other UMaine researchers include, Shihfen Tu and Craig Mason, psychologists and assistant and associate professors respectively of education and applied quantitative methods and co-coordinators of research and evaluation at the CCIDS.
The first year involves conducting a needs assessment with community members, teachers, policy makers, providers, youth and other stakeholders, and to lay groundwork acquiring additional state and federal funds to expand prevention services.
By the second year, the researchers anticipate identifying the substance abuse prevention concerns of Maine’s communities, then recommend ways to change things. Such fixes could involve policy changes in state, school or community drug programs, establishment of community centers and other ways to get educational information to young people, Gilson says.
Linda Williams, the prevention team manager with the state Office of Drug Abuse, says the UMaine Prevention Center of Excellence, will have a counterpart at a similar new center at the University of Southern Maine. USM will have separate funding.
Williams says that although the state has an effective drug abuse program in existence, the two Prevention Centers for Excellence can extend the reach to communities that are not benefiting as they might from available resources. In order to dispense grants to communities for substance abuse programs, Williams says communities must apply for them with grant applications that match state RFP (request for proposals) criteria. In the past when the state has sought proposals, some communities with substance abuse issues haven’t responded at all, she says.
“We don’t want a gap between the haves and the have-nots,” she says. The state doesn’t have the capacity to address the needs in underserved population areas, she says.
DePoy says the research they’ll be assembling and resulting recommendations may not be unique, but will provide the evidence that state and federal governments and communities need to extend the depth of their anti-drug abuse programs to better reach communities in relevant ways.
Researchers hope to consult with researchers at the UMaine-based Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center, which also has been working on community-based prevention, education and treatment initiatives in Washington and Hancock counties.
The thrust of the Prevention Centers on Excellence will be on prevention of substance abuse more than on legal consequences.
“Law enforcement comes after drug abuse,” says Tu. “What we’re trying to do is to prevent drug abuse from happening in the first place.”
DePoy notes that the state has been successful in creating a culture of non-smokers in Maine, and she believes it can happen with drug abuse. “They’ve been very successful in creating behavior changes,” she says. “That’s our ultimate goal.”