The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), which for two decades has been the most generous and visible private funder of addiction treatment and prevention programs in the U.S., has announced that it will no longer have a separate program area for funding addiction-related programs.

Instead, any new grantmaking related to addiction will take place under the foundation's Vulnerable Populations portfolio, said foundation president and CEO Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., in a recent letter to RWJF grantees. "Often the neediest populations -- such as the chronically homeless, new immigrants, victims of domestic abuse -- are faced with multiple health and social issues, including addiction, that must be addressed in an integrated way for these individuals to succeed. The Vulnerable Populations grantmaking effort focuses mainly on these populations."

Join Together, the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, Faces and Voices of Recovery, the Legal Action Center, and Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America are among the better-known addiction-field programs that have received funding from RWJF over the years.

Lavizzo-Mourey said that the foundation was proud of its work in addiction over the past 20 years. "We have supported the growth and development of many of the major leadership organizations working to reduce the harmful effects of substance-use disorders and addictions, and have also supported research on policy issues in the field," she wrote. "Our most recent work has brought focus to the issues of quality of care for persons with alcohol and other drug addictions."

The foundation will honor its current grant commitments, said Lavizzo-Mourey, "but we do not envision making new investments in addiction outside of the vulnerable populations we are targeting."

However, she added, "We will continue to actively work to extract and disseminate the lessons that emerge from our investments in improving the quality of addiction treatment and in addiction prevention."