The Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act (CRTA) allocates
Illinois Department of Human Services funding to initiate or
expand programs that address the negative impacts of
substance misuse and mental illness. The funded programs are
intended to ameliorate a broad range of social and public
health concerns that arose as inadvertent consequences
(e.g., poverty, community and family disruptions, violence
and trauma exposure, and homelessness) of the decades-long
war on drugs, which treated substance misuse (and often
mental illness) as a criminal justice rather than a public
health issue.
Along with funding for new or expanded programming, CRTA
also provides monies for evaluating the public health
impacts of each program. To carry out the evaluations, a
collaboration of investigators was assembled, composed of
the University of Illinois at Chicago Jane Addams College of
Social Work faculty and doctoral research assistants,
investigators at the University of Chicago and Wayne State
University, and a support team provided by the National
Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago.
For each CRTA-funded program, members of the evaluation
collaborative were invited to select which CRTA-funded
program or programs they would like to evaluate. The
selecting investigator(s) was then designated as the Co-I(s)
responsible for developing an evaluation plan and overseeing
the implementation of the evaluation, including data
collection, conducting data analysis, and developing
quarterly and summary annual reports of the findings.The
NORC team supports methodological design, data collection,
and analysis. The projects that have been funded include: