Communities Can Be ‘Trained’ to Prevent Substance Abuse

Encouraging findings for a new model:

Communities That Care (CTC), a system of individualized, evidence-based substance-use-prevention programs, reduces risky behaviors such as alcohol use, smoking, and fighting in adolescents, according to the results of the Community Youth Development Study, published in the September 7 Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

Eighth-grade students living in communities that employed CTC strategies were about 33 percent less likely to begin smoking and drinking than peers living in control communities that had no such prevention programs, and were 25 percent less likely to engage in delinquent behavior—which can be a predictor of future substance use—than eighth graders living in control communities.

The CTC program is designed to take into account individual communities' needs in terms of behaviors that place adolescents at risk. Under the program, community leaders such as clergy, teachers, health workers, social workers, and other volunteers receive training that enables them to implement the prevention strategies based on community needs. These strategies can focus on a range of issues, such as preventing drug and alcohol use, ameliorating family conflict, reducing violence, and preventing HIV/AIDS, for instance.

Intervention communities received six training sessions delivered over the course of a year by certified CTC trainers. In addition, community leaders received training on how to implement a CTC system based on the needs of their community.

When heroin hits home

From the Washington Post:

The tall young man with the square jaw and the mop of dark brown hair held the phone pressed against his ear. He didn't know what to do.

His girlfriend had just shot heroin from a tiny plastic bag he'd given her earlier that night, in her car, in the rain. She'd taken it back home to her parents' house in Centreville. She'd gone alone to her room and closed the door. She'd laid out the powder, dissolved it in water, as he'd taught her to do, drawn it into a syringe through a cotton ball, as he'd taught her to do, and injected it into a vein in her arm.

That much Skylar Schnippel knew, because his girlfriend, Alicia Lannes, had talked to him on the phone as she used. That was four minutes ago. But now she wasn't answering. So he called her again. He called her twice in two minutes. Then twice in the next two minutes. It was 1:45 in the morning, and she wasn't answering, and he knew. She must have overdosed, as she'd done two times before in front of him: her head lolling, her face pale, her lips blue.