Parallel with the social transition the extent of legal and illegal drug abuse has increased significantly in Hungary. Central Transdanubia was hit by this tendency as well, the use of psychoactive drugs has increased, particularly in big cities. Within the field of research on drug issues we mainly concentrate on this problem. We focus our research projects on the changes/variations in opinions of local societies concerning drug use, on the investigation of the service-structure and general situation of institutions dealing with the problem, and the direct affectedness and evaluation of latency, and on the structures of drug use practices of different age-groups. Related to this last issue our institute employs new methodological tools in order to assess the parameters of the estimations of hidden population (e.g. estimation on RDS sample, social network analysis) better. With the results of these research projects we primarily aim at increasing the efficiency of the local anti-drug actions and decreasing the social problems caused by drug use. With the increase of drug-prevention work at schools a new research direction opens up for us, which is the evaluation of efficiency of prevention-projects and anti-drug activities at schools.

Research reports are available in Hungarian. For further information concerning the research projects, please contact us via the projekt@echomail.hu e-mail address.