At the onset, national Criminal Justice Drug Abuse Treatment Studies’ (CJ-DATS’) investigators identified eight broad priority areas of research, including screening and referral, modifying treatment programs and interventions for reentering offenders, improving engagement and retention, linking services in the community, improving coordination with criminal justice reentry processes, addressing the needs of special populations, understanding the general organizational and contextual factors in treating offenders, and understanding current treatment practices for the drug-involved offender. In the studies described, the work has begun in all of these priority areas. CJ-DATS has created a research infrastructure with the goal of improving outcomes for offenders with substance use disorders and testing approaches to better integrate drug abuse treatment with public safety and public health systems. In 2002, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) launched the CJ-DATS, a major research initiative. CJ-DATS researchers and NIDA are working together with Federal, State, and local criminal justice partners to develop and test integrated approaches to the treatment of offenders with drug use disorders. Currently, there are 13 studies underway in CJ-DATS. These studies address important cross-cutting issues in criminal justice and drug treatment when dealing with drug-involved offenders. This paper highlights eight underlying issues covered in the CJ-DATS studies. Tables, references