Drug Outreach, Promoting Awareness (DOPA) is an undergraduate outreach program for local high school students designed to convey the neurobiological basis, risks, and addictive potential of commonly abused drugs. Here we describe DOPA and evaluate the program, including its impact on high school student attitudes about drug harm risk and…

Aims: In most countries, cannabis use rates are highest among young people. Efforts invested in cannabis prevention programmes have had limited success. In part, this may be attributed to a dearth of meaningful discussion in classroom settings on the topic and scarcity of credible resources. Although young people want opportunities to engage in…

Purpose: Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and other drugs use typically increases in prevalence and frequency during middle and late adolescence. School health instruction often focusses on providing facts and rarely provides tools for addressing the psychosocial risk factors needed to prevent substance use. The purpose of this paper is to report about…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established School Health Profiles (Profiles) in 1996 to monitor school health policies and practices in secondary schools in states and school districts across the United States. Profiles is a system of surveys conducted biennially in even-numbered years and provides data on the following topics:…

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is responsible for managing the care and custody of approximately 175,000 federal inmates--an estimated 20 percent of whom have been diagnosed with a substance use disorder. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to review BOP's efforts to provide drug treatment to federal inmates. This report (1)…

People who use illicit drugs often experience stigma that manifests in systemic discrimination, marginalisation and social exclusion. Drug education, which is underpinned by the information model, and often includes fear-based tactics. Eleven focus groups were conducted with sixty-six young people (14-16 years old) in ten schools in Northern…

Background: Considerable attention has been focused on the impact of young people's alcohol use. To address this, schools often implement alcohol and drug education and there are many potential programmes to choose from. Objective: The aim of this study was to identify evidence-based alcohol education programmes for schools. Methods: A systematic…