This paper is the first to examine the two-year outcomes of the 12-session version of an indicated drug abuse prevention program aimed at high-risk youth; the authors’ discussion includes information about the subjects, attrition at the two-year follow-up, and a discussion of program outcomes.
This paper describes the two-year follow-up of a 12-session version of an indicated drug abuse prevention program, Project Towards No Drug Abuse (TND). Self-instruction programming often is used to help youth that are at high risk for dropout and drug abuse to complete their high school education. However, a health educator-led program is much more interactive. The authors discuss their methodology, which included examining the effects of self-instruction versus health educator-led versions of this curriculum; eighteen schools were randomly assigned by block to one of three conditions: standard care (control), health educator-led classroom program, and self-instruction classroom program. Subjects were followed up after one and two years. The two-year results are reported in this paper. The self-instruction program produced no behavioral effects relative to the standard care control condition. The two-year follow-up results indicated that program effects were maintained, in the health educator-led version, regarding cigarette smoking and hard drug use. The authors conclude that more work is needed to learn how to maintain effects across substances, and continued exploration of modalities of implementation may be helpful. Publisher Abstract Provided