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The maintenance of this bibliography is supported by Grant DA-04376 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to Dr. Ian Stolerman.

History of NIDA Support


Ian Stolerman and colleagues at the Institute of Psychiatry, London published the first version of the Drug Discrimination Database in a book recording the proceedings of the second international conference on drug discrimination (Stolerman IP, Baldy RE, Shine PJ (1982) Drug discrimination procedure: a bibliography. In: Drug Discrimination: Applications in CNS Pharmacology, Colpaert FC, Slangen JL, eds. Elsevier, Amsterdam. Pp 401 441). At that time there were 427 citations in the database. The growth of the field became so rapid that continued updating of the database was not feasible without financial support.

With encouragement and advice from Don Overton and other workers in the field, Ian Stolerman applied for a NIDA RO1 grant in 1985. This application was submitted with some nervousness because Ian Stolerman had never submitted to NIDA before, the nature of the work was unusual for an RO1 (although no more suitable type of support could be identified) and because foreign grants had to meet special criteria. Happily the application was received favourably and funded in full.

With the benefit of the NIDA grant to support a part-time research assistant and other expenses, the maintenance of the database was assured for the next three years. Subsequent applications for renewal of the grant were successful and the project was therefore supported by a succession of three-year grants until 2002. Changes to the regulations relating to foreign grants then made application for a five-year grant possible, and thus funding of the database is now assured for 2002-2007. During the twenty years since the original publication, the size of the database has grown to 3,660 citations and it has been distributed in various print formats, on floppy disks and from the website that was established by Jonathan Kamien in 1995. Jonathan Kamien has continued to maintain and develop the database and has made many valuable contributions to its design and functionality.

Ian Stolerman and colleagues who have worked on the project thank NIDA for its continuing generous support for the project and are also grateful to the many members of Study Sections who responded favourably to applications for support. The priority scores awarded are shown below.