Neglected classics

Balter's work with Nurco was in the criminological tradition: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1211378

(I'm looking for someone to do a literature review based on this line of studies, and the most highly cited of the work that subsequently cited these studies: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7327796 . I think DAD would publish that lit review.)

This line of studies, sustained by the late David Nurco, as well as John Ball, from a base in the Friends Research Institute in Baltimore, is important reading for anyone seeking to master drug dependence epidemiology. David was at University of Maryland and John had been a NIDA Intramural Program researcher (Lexington, KY: Addiction Research Center) before he moved to the Baltimore area. They were somewhat dismissive of the kind of field surveys we were doing -- didn't think 'serious' drug users would participate and be found in our samples (left truncation problem, and a sense of left-censoring, although they did not use those terms).

After Mary Monk and I submitted and got trashed for our NIDA proposal to create a primary care study base in Washington County, Maryland (with primary care and community controls) which we wanted to start to  use to conduct a series of case control studies on cannabis dependence, before studying other IRD, David came up to me at a seminar. He disclosed that he had been on the study section, and asked me why I was interested in marijuana, whether I truly thought people become dependent on marijuana, and why I wasn't studying 'real' drug problems like cocaine and heroin. My next proposal to NIDA was to study cocaine use and problems in the United States. It got the equivalent of 1.8 and then 1.7 priority scores, not good enough for funding, mainly because we only had cross-sectional samples of users, and too few newly incident users from the 1-year followup of the ECA samples.

Some of you know what happened next, and how it came to pass that my first NIDA R01 award was to complete these proposed studies in cocaine epidemiology. I thank David for that advice, even though he had misjudged the public health importance of cannabis.

(As of last December, John Ball was still alive, per our mutual friends Faith and Jerry Jaffe.)

R.I.P. for Mitch and for David.