NCJ Number
220239
Journal
Journal of Drug Education Volume: 37 Issue: 2 Dated: 2007 Pages: 191-215
Date Published
2007
Length
25 pages
Annotation
This article describes the implementation of an innovative curriculum called Drugs-At-Work (DAW), which was evaluated in three phases.
Abstract
The development of the Drugs-At-Work (DAW)curriculum was greatly influenced by the longitudinal study described by George Vaillant in The Natural History of Alcoholism (1983). The DAW curriculum combines components from school-based drug prevention and ethics education programs. DAW is different from existing drug prevention curriculums in a number of ways. First, DAW emphasizes the indirect detrimental impact that drug-related problems have on non-users. Second, instead of teaching social skills or trying to convince participants that they have misjudged the social norms, the DAW attempts to directly change the social norms by portraying substance abuse as a shared problem that hurts families and businesses and damages the country’s economy. Third, the DAW spends more time trying to reduce peer pressure than it does on coaching youth to resist peer pressure. The primary goal of the DAW is to delay the age of first use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (ATOD) by reducing peer pressure and changing the local peer group norms. Evaluated in three phases, the analyses revealed that the DAW significantly reduced ATOD use for the total sample and for the Mexican-American, the Anglo, and the African-American students examined separately. The results presented suggest that an ethics approach to drug prevention may be able to delay the age of first use. Of course, the implementation of the DAW was limited to only one community and one school district and sorely needs to be replicated. Figure, tables, references