The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), in collaboration with the Office of AIDS Research of the National Institutes of Health, invited national and international researchers to the "Research Synthesis Symposium on the Prevention of HIV in Drug Abusers" in Flagstaff, Arizona, August 3-5, 1997. The purpose of the Symposium was to review the findings from more than a decade of research on the effectiveness of community-based interventions designed to reduce risk behaviors and to prevent the spread of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in drug-using populations. This Special Issue of Public Health Reports provides a comprehensive review of the origins, evolution, and current status of the HIV prevention science knowledge base that was derived, in large part, from NIDA's HIV research and intervention programs. In the mid-1980s, NIDA-funded drug abuse and HIV researchers responded to the challenges of the changing dynamics of drug abuse and the spread of HIV and other infectious diseases. They developed, implemented, and evaluated the effectiveness of a range of interventions, including community-based outreach risk reduction, drug treatment, and needle exchange programs. In this Special Issue, the researchers report that these interventions have been effective in reaching at-risk populations and enabling them to change their risk behaviors, thus reducing their risk of acquiring or transmitting HIV infection. NIDA's prevention research has provided important empirical data that demonstrate that HIV transmission in drug-using populations is preventable.

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