Douglas Longshore, 56; Studied Substance Abuse

Douglas Yale Longshore, 56, associate director and principal investigator at the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs and adjunct behavioral scientist at Rand Corp., died Dec. 30 of metastatic melanoma at his home in Santa Monica.

His drug-use-related research interests included interventions for criminal offenders, motivation for treatment and recovery, racial-ethnic and cultural factors in treatment and recovery, and HIV incidence and risk behavior trends.

His work, including more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, was widely published in scientific journals.

His most recent research involved evaluating California's Proposition 36, which gives adults arrested for nonviolent drug-related offenses the option of treatment.

Born in Bryan, Texas, in 1949, Longshore received a bachelor's degree from Rice University. He earned a doctorate in sociology from UCLA in 1981.