Attitudes towards drugs among school youths: An evaluation of the Swedish DARE programme

Abstract

Illicit drug use among high school students is on the rise in Sweden as well as in other countries. This fact has put high demand on the police, who are not only expected to reduce the availability of drugs but also to take part in the effort to affect the students' demand for drugs. The aim of this study was to analyse what impact students' demand for and perceived availability of illicit drugs in the seventh grade have on their attitudes towards and experience with drugs in the eighth grade. Moreover, the purpose was to investigate to what extent a specific police-led school-based drug prevention programme, the project DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), affects students' attitudes and experiences regarding drugs.As a part in an ongoing evaluation of the Swedish DARE programme (called VÅGA) about 1,800 students in 22 Swedish junior high schools on three occasions anonymously answered questions about their attitudes towards and experiences with drugs. Contextual analysis was used to estimate the significance of various student-level risk-factors (such as family bonding, school involvement, and peer activity) and school aggregated contextual factors.The results show that students' curiosity and perceived availability of illicit drugs at the school-level have statistically significant effects on drug-related attitudes and experiences at the individual-student level. The attitudes towards and experiences with drugs in the eighth grade of students who participated in the DARE programme in the seventh grade were not different from those students who did not participate in the programme. A brief discussion of what measures the police should conduct in order to block the availability of drugs and what their role in schools should be are finally presented.