Background: Comprehensive health education in schools can effectively prevent drug use and related outcomes, but successful implementation remains challenging. Contextual determinants, including intervention-setting compatibility, focus on the intervention, available resources, and leadership support, influence implementation success. This study…

Similar to national trends, in Illinois, fatal opioid overdoses have risen. Black men (35+) outrank all other racial subgroups for the highest rate of fatal opioid overdoses in the state. To address this, Prevention First and the Illinois Department of Human Services developed a public health education campaign to support increasing enrollment in…

Drug use trends change rapidly among youth, leaving educators and researchers struggling to respond promptly. Widely adopted universal evidence-based interventions (EBIs), such as the Michigan Model for Health™ (MMH), and their delivery systems offer an opportunity to reach large youth populations and reduce the onset and escalation of emerging…

While researchers have developed more effective programs and strategies to prevent the initiation of substance use and increasingly communities are delivering these interventions, determining the degree to which they are delivered as they were designed remains a significant research challenge. In the past several years, more attention has been…

A questionnaire was administered to university and high school students enrolled in drug education programs to survey the credibility of various message sources. Doctoral-level university-trained professionals with relevant experience were found to be the message source deemed most credible by both groups of students. (Author/MT)

Analyses of the data and youths' prescriptions concerning prevention of abuse yielded 12 program recommendations. These programs can create the awareness that led to concerted programs to stop the war and pollution. When designing educational-information programs, one must be aware of the total system of causal factors. (Author/BEF)

Investigated effective drug prevention strategies for school-aged populations from drug prevention programs funded by the Department of Health and Human Services Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. Interviews with model programs' directors and staff highlighted 15 strategies essential for developing effective programs. Strategies focused on…

Teaching students decision-making skills is integral to many drug education programs. Conducted series of studies examining elementary and secondary school students' attitudes toward making decisions. Found different age groups perceived making decisions differently. Suggests practitioners need to take maturational levels into consideration when…

This report describes a model for staff development of an elementary school drug education pilot program designed to help children develop positive self-concepts and skills for decision making. The objectives of the staff development model are to help teachers, (a) assess their own needs and strengths, (b) plan and practice classroom activities in…

Scotland Against Drugs, a privately funded partnership, launched a national staff development program known as the Primary School Initiative (PSI). The initiative provides an opportunity for schools and local authorities to evaluate their drug education efforts. The training encourages teachers to develop their own drug education policies and…

A half-time Student Assistance Program (SAP) was designed and implemented for two semesters in an urban high school in New Jersey. Findings indicated that proportion of students who used SAP increased with time, male participants outnumbered females, and alcohol and drug issues were most frequently cited as presenting problems for both males and…

Miami-Dade Community College is engaged in a project designed to develop a model Associate Degree program for Human Services/Drug Abuse workers, to establish a national consortium of community colleges to offer the program, and to develop the curricula and instructional methodology for a "first course" in drug abuse for persons going into the…

Marijuana and alcohol use by high school students has continued to increase through the latter part of the 1970's. To gain information on the extent of this problem in their area, a school district in rural western Pennsylvania approved a study of drug and alcohol usage by the school district's 2,200 students. For reasons of confidentiality, all…

This report describes an experimental program developed by the RAND Corporation to prevent or reduce the use of alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana by adolescents. Section 1 introduces Project ALERT and presents major findings and conclusions from a study which assessed the program's effects at several points over a period of 15 months in 30…

To attempt to incorporate the perceptions of consumers of alcohol education programs about topic relevance and importance, a modified version of a methodology that extracts, evaluates, and combines information from novices and experts to determine commonly held scripts and schema was used. In the first of two studies, 37 students at Texas…