CDAS was founded in 1990 by its current Director, James A. Inciardi, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, fostered at the time by his twenty years of prior research with drug-involved populations in New York and Florida, and his more recent HIV prevention research in collaboration with the University of Miami School of Medicine.

Professor Inciardi came to the University of Delaware in 1976 with NIH funding that continued through the 1980s; however, the establishment of CDAS occurred as an outgrowth of new funding opportunities initiated by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). In an effort to develop innovative approaches in the treatment of drug abuse, NIDA established its R18 funding mechanism, an initiative that would support 10 large-scale projects across the nation at funding levels of up to $1 million per year for five years. Two of the ten projects were awarded to the University of Delaware. These became the financial basis for the founding of CDAS. And importantly, because a secondary purpose of the R18 projects was to create new drug abuse treatment slots, for several years in the early 1990s, CDAS was the largest provider of residential drug treatment services for offenders in the State of Delaware.

Steven S. Martin became associated with Professor Inciardi in 1989 as a Scientist and participated in the establishment of the Center. He has continued to work with Professor Inciardi in the development of the NIDA-funded research as well as generating his own portfolio of projects funded by state and federal sources. Lana D. Harrison, now a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, joined CDAS as the Associate Director in 1995, and served in that position until mid-2006. During that time, Professor Harrison secured substantial funding from both the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Harrison remains a Research Scientist at the CDAS and Steven S. Martin is currently the CDAS Associate Director.

CDAS Organization and Administration  

The Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies is administratively housed in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, with its main office located off-campus at 77 East Main Street in Newark . CDAS also has a research office in Coral Gables, Florida , as well as three field offices – one in Miami , a second in Miami Beach, and a third in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which is fully supported by Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.  

The Coral Gables research office was established in 2001 as an outgrowth of Professor Inciardi’s extensive work in South Florida and Brazil. Professor Inciardi had been recruited to the University of Delaware in 1976 from the University of Miami School of Medicine. His first NIH grant at Delaware had been awarded initially to the University of Miami but immediately transferred to Delaware, and since that time, he has continued to conduct research in Florida . Moreover, because Miami has been an epicenter for two of the most heavily funded areas of social science research – HIV/AIDS and prescription drug abuse – having offices in Florida presents unique opportunities for funding that might not otherwise emerge. In addition to Professor Inciardi, two other accomplished researchers are based at the  Florida offices – Hilary L. Surratt (Ph.D. in Psychology from the City University of New York), and Steven P. Kurtz (Ph.D. in Sociology from Florida International   University ). By the beginning of 2007, more than half of the Center’s funding was through the Florida offices.

Based on much of the ground-breaking work generated by the R18 projects, Professor Inciardi received a Merit Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which provided an additional $10 million in funding over a 10-year period into 2006.  Beginning in 2002, Inciardi and his research team began participation in a major cooperative agreement among 10 universities and the National Institute on Drug Abuse: the Criminal Justice Drug Abuse Treatment Services (CJ-DATS) research project.

CDAS Accomplishments and Mission

Since the University of Delaware’s Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies was established in 1991, it has made significant contributions to both the scientific and policy communities. One of the first achievements was the development of the well-known KEY therapeutic community drug treatment program at the Multi-Purpose Criminal Justice Facility in Wilmington, Delaware. From a small 20-bed program, it has expanded to almost 400 beds statewide in three institutions. This was followed by the establishment of the CREST Outreach Center, the world’s first therapeutic community in a corrections-based work release setting. CREST started with 60 beds and is now over 400 beds.  

The KEY-CREST corrections-based treatment continuum established by CDAS investigators turned out to be a major scientific, human services, public relations, and technology transfer success for the University of Delaware. Overall, the KEY-CREST initiative resulted in the production of more than 200 papers, books, and presentations; it was highlighted in meetings organized by NIDA, the National Institute of Justice, the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT), the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives; the National Institutes of Health produced and distributed videos on the CREST Outreach Center work release TC; the successes of the programs were topics of discussion in numerous Congressional hearings; the KEY and CREST were cited as model programs by President Clinton on several occasions; they were featured on national news programs; and outcome data were used as support for the enabling legislation for the Department of Justice’s Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) program initiatives.

Furthermore, literally thousands of visitors have toured the programs, particularly the KEY, because it was such an oasis in the walled fortress of concrete and steel in which it was housed. In fact, the requests to tour the KEY program were so numerous that they had to be limited so the program could effectively function as a therapeutic community. Visitors included treatment professionals, correctional administrators and researchers from all over the United States; there were directors and staff from numerous federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy; and also coming to see the KEY were governors, legislators, Drug Czars, and members of the U.S. Congress. Visitors came from more than thirty nations on five continents; they came from countries both large and small – from Australia and Brazil to Sri Lanka and the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis. What they saw at the KEY was a dynamic prison treatment program, a beehive of activity in which the community of drug-involved offenders were actively working on their recovery; and they experienced a total treatment environment whose history, organization, philosophy, and therapeutic principles were displayed on program walls, painted by resident artists. The lessons learned by many of the visitors were brought back to their home communities, and the program model was adopted in many countries, including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Panama, Romania, Spain, Thailand, and the Philippines.

CDAS accomplishments have gone well beyond criminal justice studies to include such areas as youth drug use, substance abuse prevention, health consequences of drug abuse, and the abuse and diversion of prescription drugs. On this latter topic, CDAS research has become instrumental in the development and implementation of the  post-marketing surveillance and risk management programs mandated by the Food and Drug Administration. A major thrust of CDAS’s initiatives has, and continues to be, the design of research programs aimed at reducing the spread of HIV and AIDS in hard-to-reach populations. Projects and target populations have ranged from probationers and prison inmates in Delaware and New Jersey to sex workers and gay and bisexual men in Miami, drug-involved Caribbean Islanders, and a variety of indigent populations in Brazil. Significant in this regard was the development and field testing of an HIV prevention model that was adopted by the Brazilian Ministry of Health for drug-using populations.

Closer to home in Delaware, Martin, Gealt and others at CDAS have been developing a broader portfolio of grant and contract work with the State of Delaware. Initially, this involved conducting the Delaware School Surveys of 5th, 8th, and 11th graders and the CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) and Youth Tobacco Survey (YTS) in Delaware. This annual survey work is an ongoing Center function. The work in support of the State of Delaware has subsequently expanded to a number of program evaluation studies of state prevention and treatment efforts and recently has led to the formation of the Delaware State Epidemiological Workgroup for assessment of substance abuse epidemiological and etiological data from all sources in the state of Delaware.

And finally, even closer to home have been the Center’s efforts with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation initiative to address binge drinking at UD (1998-2004) and now with the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment-funded MOSAIC program to provide outreach and services to US students with alcohol and other substance abuse problems.

Looking toward the future, we are continually seeking to increase our interaction with other researchers, policy makers, and community representatives. One of the mechanisms to accomplish this is our continued involvement in cross-site studies with other institutions. In addition, each year CDAS sponsors an innovative conference on a focused area of research. In Delaware, we are expanding services to the state with new and larger youth surveys, program evaluations, work on state committees, the creation of a State Epidemiological Outcome Workgroup, and a new joint initiative with Nemours. Our future work will continue with all of these activities in our attempts to reduce the problems associated with substance abuse and infectious diseases.