Mississippi State University received a $2 million grant last week to research substance abuse prevention and treatment options for the state’s juvenile justice population.
The Starkville, Miss., college is among six organizations that recently received funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), whose Juvenile Justice-Translational Research on Interventions for Adolescents in the Legal System (JJ-TRIALS) project will also involve research at Columbia University, Emory University, Temple, Texas Christian University, the University of Kentucky and the Chestnut Health Systems of Illinois.
The JJ-TRIALS project is expected to be a five-year program exploring how juvenile justice systems may better incorporate evidence-based drug use treatment and prevention practices and programming. Mississippi State researchers will evaluate delivery strategies for young people at 12 sites throughout the state involved in the juvenile justice system.
Angela Robertson, associate director of Mississippi State’s Social Science Research Center and principal investigator for the university’s TRIALS Research Center, said the primary question heading into the research was how to get organizations to adopt and implement evidence-based, scientifically-based research.
“We’ve learned how to treat and prevent alcohol and drug use,” she said in a recent Mississippi State press release. “The issue is why more treatment and prevention providers aren’t using these practices.”
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