In my branch our program areas range from a programmatic area that just focuses on research, just plainly describes the epidemiology of drug abuse, classic epidemiology. Who, what, how often, when, so we have the Monitoring the Future study that we support, this is a national study out of University of Michigan. And we've been supporting that for 25+ years and other things like that. Then we have areas of focus that look in psychopathology and development, adolescent development, the impact that has on drug abuse and behavior.

A lot of this is intertwined with disparities, health disparities, racial and ethnic health disparities and HIV/AIDS because we see HIV/AIDS as a twin epidemic with drug abuse. Particularly with IV drug use and a whole, because drug using behaviors generally lend itself or are concomitant with risky sexual behavior. And HIV/AIDS and all the STI's and all that fit right in there.

So then we also have areas of focus that look at drug markets because understanding what happens at the street level with people's behavior related to drugs is very important in understanding the phenomenon of drug abuse, why it persists. And certainly within the social epidemiology program, now, which is one of the newer areas of focus, would be to again look at that environment, the context and the individual interact with the environment. And that could be a whole host of, it could be broad, and it could be specific.

You can range from just looking at the social environment itself and in fact we are in involved in a study called Mapping the Social Environment which allows us to really look at all the measures there are, we just started doing this, out there that are measures of the environment and those most relevant to drug abuse research. And to really sort of on one hand create a catalog and to generate some discussion in the field, "Are these the right measures" or "Which are the salient measures?"

So we have a range of programs within epidemiology that help us support science that will help to further unearth this phenomenon of drug abuse and what we do about it.