The NCAA, as it does every four years, will survey student-athletes to gather data about substance abuse.

Those data provide direction for drug-education and drug-testing policies and practices to the NCAA membership. Data collected and analyzed since 1985 have been helpful in the initiation and development of the NCAA drug-testing program, identifying trends in drug use, and providing comparative data to evaluate NCAA drug-education and drug-testing efforts.

The Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports (CSMAS) worked with the NCAA research staff to revise this year's survey. Additional items were added to collect more information about tobacco use, a campus-wide health concern, and about dietary supplement use, a major factor in positive drug tests.

The survey will be mailed this month to faculty athletics representatives (FAR) at every NCAA four-year institution. The FAR will be requested to schedule the administration of the survey before October 15 with those teams identified from a random selection conducted by the NCAA research staff. No institution will be asked to survey more than two specific athletics teams. The completed surveys will be mailed back to the NCAA national office, where staff members will use the data to develop the "2001 NCAA Study of Substance Use and Abuse Habits of College Student-Athletes."

The CSMAS will receive the report generated from analysis of the data and make further recommendations to the NCAA Executive Committee and the Divisions I, II and III Management Councils for future drug-education and drug-testing initiatives.

The 1997 report currently is available on the NCAA Web site at www.ncaa.org/
sports_sciences/education. The new report will be published online after review and approval. For more information about the study, contact the health and safety staff at the national office.