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…

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…

Objectives: Drug education is delivered by a broad spectrum of multi-disciplinary practitioners within the fields of health promotion, drug prevention and treatment, social care, and community and youth work. However, drug education is often misunderstood or conflated with drug information and/or drug prevention. This ambiguity of understanding is…

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 study investigates the effectiveness and appropriateness of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) Keepin' it REAL (KiR) curriculum--America's most prevalent in-school prevention programme--using a modified systematic review procedure as adapted from the Cochrane Handbook. No published studies research the D.A.R.E. version of KiR, and…

Today's youth face multifaceted challenges in a time when society is more aware of the consequences of unhealthy decision-making. In this study, we tested the effectiveness of an emerging intervention, GPS for SUCCESS, a classroom-based 5-week program that helps students build their purpose in life while securing a commitment to achieve it. We…

Sixth graders participating in the "Too Good for Drugs" (TGFD) prevention program in comparison to 6th graders not participating show different results by student risk level. Sixth graders from 20 middle schools were randomly assigned to receive the intervention and those from 20 paired middle schools assigned to serve as controls (N =…

The prevention of drug abuse is an especially salient topic for school psychologists and other educational professionals. Schools are the primary setting for providing education and information aimed at the prevention of drug abuse. Previous meta-analyses (Ennett, et al., 1994; West & O'Neal, 2004) indicate that one of the nation's most popular…

Classroom behavior management interventions have been used successfully with drug prevention programs to prevent subsequent antisocial behavior and substance use among youth. This article presents results from implementation of the All Stars Challenge, a classroom-based behavior management component to a drug prevention program for fifth graders.…

The national strategies of drug abuse prevention across Europe have come to recognise that the drug abuse problem presents a complex set of issues of which there is no simple solution. There is a considerable increase in investment in prevention, treatment and harm-reduction activities and increased focus on supply reduction. School settings are…

Context: Although there have been substantial advances in knowledge about drug prevention over the last decade, the majority of school-based drug prevention studies have been conducted in urban settings. There is little knowledge about the effectiveness of such programs when they are implemented in rural populations. Purpose: To examine the…

Responses from 420 parents of fifth- and sixth-grade DARE students in a Midwestern county were examined to determine the parents' perceptions of the impact of DARE on their children's and their own attitudes and behavior. Major findings indicated that most parents did not see an impact on their child's school performance or overall attendance.…

This paper tells the story of the multi-layered translational process of the Drug Resistance Strategies Project. The Drug Resistance Strategies Project provides an exemplar of translational scholarship, translating adolescent narratives about their substance use experiences into an efficacious, substance abuse prevention middle school curriculum.…

In response to recent alcohol-related tragedies and to ongoing concern about unacceptable levels of alcohol and other drug use on college campuses, Congress authorized the U.S. Department of Education to identify and promote effective campus-based prevention programs. Since 1999, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded approximately $3.5…

Reviewed available studies reporting on the negative effects of drug education programs. Findings indicated that program objectives were to prevent drug abuse. The programs' actual effect was to liberalize attitudes towards drug use. (LAB)