The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will likely merge its two institutes that study addiction. In a statement today, NIH Director Francis Collins said he had received a formal recommendation from an NIH advisory board to create a single institute to study substance use, abuse, and addiction.
The proposal "makes scientific sense," Collins said. He plans to form a task force to figure out by next summer what programs will be folded into the "proposed new institute," which will effectively merge the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).
Collins's decision is controversial. NIAAA's $462 million budget is less than half that of the $1.06 billion drug abuse institute, yet it funds a slightly higher proportion of submitted grants. Alcoholism researchers and patient advocates worried that their smaller institute would be swallowed up and that certain studies, such as research on alcoholism-related liver disease, would be cut short. Opponents also argued that combining addiction studies would give the legal consumption of alcohol a negative stigma. The NIAAA council voted earlier this year against a merger; NIDA's council voted in favor.
