Taking a Community-Based Approach to Youth Substance Abuse Prevention

In the case of teenage substance abuse prevention, this can range from stopping teens from taking drinks of alcohol to restricting access to more dangerous drugs like cocaine or fentanyl. But young people are very unlikely to seek help, even if those activities cause them distress, Murphy said. For that reason, brief interventions that leverage motivational interviewing and can be delivered in a school, work, or medical setting can make a big difference.

If you do drink, do so in moderation, and never drive after drinking.

• To date, we lack in-depth knowledge of why youths in affluent areas keep using alcohol and illicit drugs excessively.
• This response tells the brain that it is worth using the substance again to get that feeling.
• Cutting-edge medications and therapies can be used to treat co-occurring disorders.
• Many of them reported having supportive and caring parents involved in their lives, but at the same time referring to friends’ parents as being more absent, resulting in extensive partying in large homes without parental control.

The most prominent motive appears to be a desire to feel a part of the current social milieu and to attain or maintain high social status within the peer group. Motives for abstaining, apart from lack of interest, included academic ambitions, activities requiring sobriety, parental influence, and a wish to stay healthy. The students expressed negative attitudes towards current information-based prevention as well as problems with using selective prevention interventions due to fear of being registered or reported to the authorities. Students’ suggestions for feasible universal prevention concerned reliable information from credible sources, stricter substance control measures, extended parental involvement, and social leisure activities without substance use. Suggestions regarding selective prevention were guaranteed confidentiality and non-judging encounters when seeking help due to substance use problems. In contemporary American society, it has become commonplace among young people to engage in some level of experimentation with substances.

Social Resistance Skills

With regard to selective prevention, the students were critical of the current risk of being reported to parents, registered within medical records or reported to the authorities if turning to professionals for support for substance use problems. They claimed that this circumstance serves as a massive counteracting force to seek help at an early stage for oneself or for peers and that the possibility of reaching teen drug abuse out anonymously is essential for taking the first step in seeking help. The students’ attitudes to current substance use prevention, aimed to increase students’ knowledge, are to a large extent negative. Instead, students suggested interventions focusing on credible sources of reliable information, such as from people with personal adverse experiences of substance use and people whom they can identify with.

What Are the Effects of Using Drugs During Adolescence?

Preventing early-stage substance use or delaying the onset of use is a goal of many of these prevention initiatives. They typically focus on alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use because these are the most widely used substances in our society. Because of their widespread use, these substances pose the greatest risk to public health. Middle or junior high school age students are most often targeted in prevention efforts because early adolescence is the time of life when substance use experimentation often begins to occur.

Parenting can affect substance use both directly and indirectly by influencing established precursors of substance use such as aggressive behavior and other conduct problems. In particular, harsh disciplinary practices, poor parental monitoring, low levels of family bonding, and high levels of family conflict contribute to both internalizing and externalizing behaviors including substance use and abuse. Of course, family and parenting factors can also play a key beneficial or protective role in preventing adolescent substance use. Examples of protective parenting practices include firm and consistent limit-setting, careful monitoring, nurturing and open communication patterns with children (13). NREPP connects members of the public to intervention developers so they can learn how to implement these approaches in their communities. The motives to use substances are governed by a number of personal, social and environmental factors [16], ranging from personal knowledge, abilities, beliefs and attitudes, to the influence of family, friends and society [17,18,19,20].

Moreover, interview studies are always vulnerable for social desirability bias due to a potential desire to give socially acceptable answers [72]. However, the possibility to terminate participation at any time, along with the circumstance that most of the interviewers are health care professionals, thereby used to handle secrecy in consultation situations, may have decreased the risk of desirability bias in the current study. Confirming that both alcohol and illicit drugs are frequently used among students in the current municipality, a number of motives for substance use were expressed by the participants. The most prominent motive appeared to be a desire to feel a part of the social milieu and to attain or maintain high social status, with fear of being excluded from attractive social activities and parties if abstaining from substance use.

How do research-based prevention programs work?

She had strong support from her parents, both college-educated Nigerian immigrants. But she also saw firsthand the devastating effects that gang violence, crime, drugs, and alcohol were having on too many young people in her community. When she was in high school, her family bought their first house about 20 miles away in the middle-class, suburban neighborhood of Roselle, NJ. The dramatic differences between these two worlds drove home for her how significant a zip code can be in determining a child’s outlook and opportunities.

At the two-year follow-up assessment, students in the intervention group reported drinking an average of 3.6 drinks per drinking occasion, compared to 4.0 drinks per occasion for controls, a small effect size that was statistically significant. A third study evaluated the effectiveness of the BASICS program among fraternity members. In this study, students in the control group received a required one-hour didactic presentation on alcohol use. Findings indicated that students receiving BASICS had significantly greater reductions in average drinks per week and typical peak blood alcohol content levels at the one-year follow-up. In addition, BASICS was found to produce effects on negative consequences of alcohol use.

• Creating Lasting Family Connections (CLFC) is a selective intervention that is designed to prevent substance abuse and violence among adolescents and families in high-risk environments.
• During April–May 2020, semi-structured telephone interviews with the students were conducted by five of the authors (PK, YD, AKC, TH, CS).
• Suggestions regarding selective prevention were guaranteed confidentiality and non-judging encounters when seeking help due to substance use problems.