How communities can prevent substance abuse in teens
One of the things that parents worry about is the exposure of their children to drugs.
There are not guarantees that your child will not use drugs but a community based intervention before teenage years can prevent kids from using drugs, according to a new longitudinal study from the University of Washington Social Development Research Group.
The results found that likelihood of abstaining from “gateway drug” – alcohol, tobacco and marijuana through age 21 was 49 percent higher in participants from the intervention towns.
The scientists analysed nine waves of data collected between 2004 and 2014 from 4407 participants (grade 5 through age 21) in the community-randomised trial of the Communities that Care (CTC) prevention system.
Communities that Care is an initiative which help communities organise around prevention, choose appropriate programs for their populations and collects information on young people’s experiences with alcohol, drug and tobacco use and delinquency.
CTC is developed on the premise that it can give the opportunities and tools to communities to adopt and sustain healthy behaviours. This program is used by hundreds of cities and towns in the United States and many communities in Australia.
This study was conducted in 24 rural communities in Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Oregon, Utah and Washington. Towns were randomly assigned as control communities or intervention communities.
The control communities continued to use whatever prevention programs they had in place while intervention communities use the CTC system to select evidence-based, prevention-oriented programs based on risk factors that were found to be higher among their youth.
Communities were asked to focus on grades five to nine.
Many intervention communities opted for three to five programs such as classroom-based learning in life skills, parent-support classes and after school activities like Big Brother Big Sisters.
Training for these programs began in 2003 and they were launch in 2004 when the children were in sixth grade.
The children’s behaviour was monitored for ten years through surveys.
The results found that likelihood of abstaining from “gateway drug” – alcohol, tobacco and marijuana through age 21 was 49 percent higher in participants from the intervention towns with a reduced lifetime incidence of violence by 11 percent through age 21 years.
The results also showed that CTC participants were 18 percent more likely to stay away from criminal behaviours such as theft, vandalism and illegal use of weapons.
Among males, participants from the CTC town were more likely to refrain from cigarette smoking, marijuana and inhalant use, as well as from antisocial behaviour and violence. But these differences were smaller among females which needs to be explained with the help of further studies
The proportion of participants who used drugs or engaged in criminal behaviour in the past year did not differ between CTC communities and control towns even though more participants from the CTC communities never engaged in these behaviours.
The study concludes that kids who grow up in communities that used evidence-based, coordinated approach to prevention are more likely to refrain from substance use, antisocial behaviours and violence through to age 21 years.
The community plays a very important role in how kids develop over the years through adulthood and if the community invests in evidence-based, coordinated prevention systems, then kids (not only high-risk kids but all kids) have a higher chance or refraining from risky behaviours right up to adulthood.
Source: American Journal of Public Health
