Community-Focused Drug Abuse Prevention

Abstract

Challenged to react responsively to prevent alcohol and other drug problems, communities need to know what will work and how to achieve results quickly. However, the complexity of communities and their lack of closure make traditional planning, research, and evaluation methods inadequate for this task. Planning must address the problems as those of an open, complex community for which there are no simple solutions. The type of planning needed promotes actions that can be undertaken immediately, seeks to coordinate and implement as many actions as possible, and depends on meaningful levels of participation by the wider community. In addition, addressing the problems of alcohol and drug abuse in a complex system calls for evaluation that is participatory and collaborative and is an active part of the entire planning, design, and implementation process. Its aim is to help the community achieve maximum possible results using a variety of quantitative and qualitative measures to track movement toward these results. And finally, research is needed that reflects the complex character of the communities in which it is to be applied and that will indicate to communities what multicomponent approaches will work best for them.