Set against a backdrop of diminished interest in drug education outside of school settings in Ireland, this paper draws from 10 years of professional practice in the field of drug education and prevention, to reflect on illicit drug use in Ireland and on the lay understandings of illicit drug use encountered by this practitioner. This paper sets…

The United States has an opioid epidemic that requires efforts to help youths and families navigate complex challenges. Extension professionals are being called on to develop programs that equitably and effectively engage and serve audiences across racial and ethnic differences. To accomplish this, Extension professionals must understand the…

Studies have shown that doping behavior emerges from contexts. Educational research would therefore be enriched by explorations of the situatedness of athletes' activity and its dynamics of development inside sporting life courses. The principles can be summarized as (a) the connection between antidoping and athletes' time-specific and meaningful…

Catalyst is a year-long, bilingual (English/Spanish) fellowship program for high school students and their teachers who live in communities affected by the war on drugs (WoD) that is being waged across the Americas. This educational effort is a response to the social suffering caused by the WoD. Catalyst is working to forge transnational networks…

The United States' War on Drugs encompasses a body of legislation characterized by punitive approaches to drug control. These policies have resulted in escalating incarceration rates and have extracted a particularly harsh toll on low-income people of color. This article argues that education on the War on Drugs is essential for effective practice…

Drug-related death (DRD) is a major public health problem globally, with rates in Scotland higher than any other UK region and among the highest in Europe. One of the most important public health interventions to emerge aimed at tackling rising DRD rates is the distribution of naloxone, the opioid antagonist, for peer administration. The Scottish…

Substance abuse, especially among adolescents, has long been an important issue in society. In light of the adverse impact of substance abuse, scholars, educators, and policy-makers have proposed different approaches to prevent and reduce such abuse. This paper investigates the effectiveness of the two prominent approaches--educational and…

In the past 10 to 15 years, the wide prevalence of various forms of negative behavior among young people in college has become one of the main causes of their deteriorating health. Traditionally classified among such forms are the excessive consumption of alcohol, smoking, and narcotics abuse. Issues relating to the protection of students' health…

This study assessed the outcomes of adapting the culturally-grounded, middle school, substance-use prevention intervention, "keepin' it REAL" ("kiR"), to target elementary school students and to address acculturation. At the beginning of 5th grade, 29 schools were randomly assigned to conditions obtained by crossing grade of implementation (5th,…

Deakin University's RuralLife alcohol and other drug (AOD) research initiative was commissioned by St John of God Hospital and Barwon Youth to evaluate their Youth Engagement Program (YEP), which is an AOD harm-reduction program intended to engage young people with AOD problems in a region that has a higher-than-state-average proportion of young…

The social norms approach to health promotion has become remarkably popular in the last 20 years, particularly in the American college system. It is an alternative to traditional fear-based approaches of health education, which a growing body of research demonstrates is often ineffective in reducing alcohol and drug misuse. The social norms…

This study examined whether Motivational Interviewing (MI), found effective with voluntary entrants to drug treatment, would improve intrinsic motivation and treatment retention among drug court probationers. Probationers were randomly assigned to receive either a two-session MI intervention or a two-session Drug Education (DE) intervention…

We present the short-term results of a quasi-experimental evaluation of the revised D. A. R. E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) curriculum. Study outcomes examined were D. A. R. E.'s effects on three substances, namely students' lifetime and 30-day use of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana, as well as their school attendance and academic…

The purpose of the study was to compare 30-day prevalence of alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use among twelfth-grade students in Montana across a rural-urban continuum during 2000, 2002, and 2004. The methods include an analysis of the Montana Prevention Needs Assessment (N = 15,372) using multivariable logistic regression adjusting for risk…

This study explores the possibility that any drug prevention program might be considered "evidence-based" given the use of data analysis procedures that optimize the chance of producing statistically significant results by reanalyzing data from a Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program evaluation. The analysis produced a number of…