The Emerging Science of Drug Abuse Prevention

Abstract

In summary, the field of drug abuse prevention has emerged over the past 15 years as a credible scientific discipline that has produced significant understanding of the underlying psychosocial risks and protective factors associated with drug use onset and progression to abuse. In addition, evidence from randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental studies of theory-based drug abuse prevention interventions indicates that a growing number of drug abuse prevention programs and policies have demonstrated efficacy in reducing risks and moderating drug abuse behaviors of youths provided the programs in comparison to controls. Based upon this body of research, drug abuse prevention principles have been developed and applied in the practice community. Finally, the field of prevention science is beginning to address the important research questions associated with taking evidence-based drug abuse prevention programs and policies to scale in the prevention practice system at the state and community level. However, numerous barriers to the continued advance of drug abuse prevention science need to be addressed and resolved. Research indicates that the vast majority of schools still use un-evaluated drug abuse prevention programs or use prevention programs that do not have strong research evidence to support their efficacy. In addition, it is clear from the research that current evidence-based drug abuse prevention programs are not targeting the youth and adolescents at high risk to drug use onset and progression to abuse. To address this problem and to substantially increase the effectiveness (effect sizes) of prevention intervention programs, it is recommended by several national research reports that a new generation of prevention interventions to address a number of behavioral health problems need to be designed and tested and that these interventions integrate our scientific knowledge across multiple disciplines to include neurobiological, behavioral, and prevention sciences. Through a better understanding of the interactions between genetic, neurobiological, and psychosocial risk and protective factors, it is proposed that more effective “targeted” prevention interventions can be developed to reach our hardest to reach groups nationwide. Several examples of how this new generation of drug abuse prevention research could be developed have been provided in this chapter to guide future thinking and planning activities.