Student-athletes acknowledged widespread marijuana use in the first NCAA Study of Substance Use Habits of College Student Athletes in 1985 -- a major factor in the Association's decision to break from United States Olympic Committee protocol and include street drugs in the new testing program in 1986.

The next survey, in 1989, surprised the NCAA with a marked increase in anabolic steroid use -- even after three years of testing at championships.

Frank Uryasz, who directed the Association's drug-testing program at the time and currently is president of The National Center for Drug Free Sport, rates the 1989 survey as one of the five most important milestones in the NCAA program's history. That's because the survey results prompted establishment of a year-round testing program the following year.

"I think eventually the NCAA would have moved to a year-round program, but it wouldn't have happened as quickly as it did," Uryasz said about the survey's impact.

The survey has resulted in other NCAA legislation and programs.

The landmark 1989 survey also revealed extensive usage of smokeless tobacco in many sports, but especially in baseball, where more than half of the athletes answering the survey reported usage.

The Association responded by prohibiting tobacco use at championships and later at all practices and regular-season games. The response also spawned the NCAA's effective "If you spit, you sit" education campaign.

More recently, the 1997 and 2001 surveys' revelations of growing ephedrine use for performance enhancement prompted expansion of testing for the substance from championships to the year-round program.

Future surveys (starting with the next study, in 2005) will reveal whether the increased emphasis on ephedrine is effective, just as recent surveys have graded efforts to deal with the problems of anabolic steroids and spit tobacco.

 Those grades generally have been good. The percentage of respondents acknowledging use of anabolic steroids fell from a high of 4.9 percent in that 1989 survey to under 1.5 percent in the last two surveys (although a slight increase in the 2001 results is helping feed recent concern about use of dietary supplements by student-athletes).

Actions to reduce spit tobacco use also have been effective, with all-sport usage dropping from 27.6 percent in 1989 to 17.4 percent in 2001, and baseball usage dropping from 56.7 percent in 1989 to 41 percent in the most recent survey.

Perhaps one of the most notable recent developments involving the drug-use survey is improvement of the survey itself.

The first three surveys were conducted under contract by Michigan State University, and those studies -- while reliably representative of college athletes and extremely useful -- were limited in scope. The surveys involved only a handful of schools and only included athletes in selected sports.

 Beginning with the 1997 study, however, the NCAA committed itself to dramatically increasing the number of participating schools and including all championship sports. The Association's education services staff took over administration of the survey, assisted by the Faculty Athletics Representatives Association.

"In the first three iterations, we did 10 schools and about 11 sports," said Gary Green, whose term as a member of the NCAA Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports ends this month. "Since we started in 1997 and then again in 2001, we've done more than 600 schools and more than 20,000 athletes, and we've done all the NCAA sports. So we get a much better picture of what the use patterns are and where we need to address our concerns."

Uryasz says the 2001 survey -- which included 21,225 student-athletes at 713 NCAA institutions, achieving a response rate of 73.6 percent under procedures emphasizing strict confidentiality -- is the best measure of athletes' substance use and abuse published anywhere in the world.

As a result, competitive-safeguards committee members and other Association policy-makers feel confident that they have the best information available when they consider the future of NCAA drug testing.

"When you want to change something, it helps when you have better statistics to go by," Green said.

-- Jack L. Copeland