(As shown in WestCAPT – Best Practices and Promising Practices Guide. Excerpt from Preventing Drug Use Among Children and Adolescents: A Research-Based Guide by the National Institute for Drug Abuse, 1997, pages i-ii)

The following principles can be applied to either existing programs to assess their potential effectiveness or used when designing innovative programs/strategies.

• Prevention programs should be designed to enhance protective factors and move toward reversing or reducing known risk factors.

• Prevention programs should target all forms of drug abuse, including the use of tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and inhalants.

• Prevention programs should include skills to resist drugs when offered, strengthen personal commitments against drug use, and increase social competency (e.g., in communications, peer relationships, self-efficacy, and assertiveness, in conjunction with reinforcement of attitudes against drug use.)

• Prevention programs for adolescents should include interactive methods, such as peer discussion groups, rather than didactic teaching techniques alone.

• Prevention programs should include a parent’s or caregiver’s component that reinforces what the children are learning – such as facts about drugs and their harmful effects – and that opens opportunities for family discussions about use of legal and illegal substances and family policies about their use.

• Prevention programs should be long-term, over the school career, with repeat interventions to reinforce the original prevention goals. For example, school-based efforts directed at elementary and middle school students should include booster sessions to help with critical transitions from middle to high school.

• Family-focused prevention efforts have a greater impact than strategies that focus on parents only or children only.

• Community programs that include media campaigns and policy changes, such as new regulations that restrict access to alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs, are more effective when they are accompanied by school and family interventions.