Grant: Operating Grant

Tobacco, alcohol and illicit drug use pose major threats to public health. Many different individual and social factors are known to both place people at risk and protect them from substance related harms and addiction, yet remarkably few studies have tested these factors over time or considered how they interact with one another. As a result, it is not well-understood why some people use substances excessively and become addicted, while others do not. This gap in knowledge has hampered our ability to design and implement effective programs for prevention and treatment. The goal of this work is to improve our understanding of the development and progression of substance involvement. Using data from a population health survey of adolescents and young adults, we seek to describe how risk and protective factors interact with one another and test hypotheses about how these factors and their interactions predict substance use and related problems. By improving our understanding of how substance use and addiction develop, these findings will have potentially high impact by informing the design of more effective prevention and treatment interventions.