NCJ Number
109680
Journal
Contemporary Drug Problems Volume: 14 Issue: 2 Dated: (Summer 1987) Pages: 147-241
Date Published
1987
Length
95 pages
Annotation
Senior staff of a Canadian provincial agency examine the literature on alcohol and drug abuse prevention and propose an expanded and comprehensive model for prevention programming.
Abstract
The paper traces the major roots of addictions prevention within the public health, social science, distribution of consumption, and proscriptive models. It emphasizes that much addictions prevention has been simplistic in nature, taking direction from one or more inadequate models and considering drug abuse patterns as isolated, unitary phenomena. Strategies have failed generally to consider important interactions among the drug, the individual, and the environment. The authors offer an alternative conceptual framework built around an information-processing model with established communications principles. The approach incorporates a diversity of findings from behavioral and developmental theories and is supported by a full range of educative, persuasive, competence development, power, and facilitative strategies. This programming model recognizes that, just as abuse patterns vary by time, place, and cultural context, the interventions needed to deal with resulting problems must similarly vary. Over 120 references.