Protective Factor Number One in Drug Use Prevention Science: In Denying or Delaying Uptake of Substances the Key Protective Factor for Your Children/Students is the “Belief that Drug are Bad”
Latest research out of University of Illinois, and not before time, has published what has been intuitively known for decades – That is that the key, and it would appear overarching, protective factor against substance use uptake is the ‘Belief that drug use is wrong’. (Also, parental reinforcement of this belief, along with honest caring and proactive parenting of the child as the other bookend of this primary protective factor)
The researchers found individual beliefs that drug use is wrong had twice the magnitude of impact compared to other risk and protective factors examined in the study. Thus, influencing adolescents' beliefs about drug use may be an important but relatively underemphasized key to modifying their behavior.
The researchers analyzed information from the 2018 Illinois Youth Survey, which measured risk behaviors among middle and high school students. The study included more than 128,000 youths in grades 8, 10, and 12 from schools across Illinois. Respondents noted whether and how frequently they had used alcohol, cannabis or tobacco in the past year. They also answered a range of questions about their attitudes, school, family and health.
"It is not surprising that drug use beliefs are linked to behavior; we certainly would expect a correlation between them. What's most noticeable is the magnitude of the effect, particularly in comparison to more established factors included in the analyses," Barton states.
In the survey, youth were asked how wrong they think it is for someone their age to consume alcohol or drugs, ranking from "not wrong at all" to "very wrong" on a four-point scale. For each unit increase in response, the likelihood of past-year drug abstinence increased by 39% for 8th graders, 50% for 10th graders, and 53% for 12th graders.
Beliefs not only correlated strongly with past usage, but also with frequency of use.
"Even among individuals who used drugs in the past year, individual beliefs that drug use is wrong were associated with less frequent use," Barton says.1
The Dalgarno Institute and other primary prevention, demand reduction and community resilience building educators, have been fully aware of this issue for many years and have challenged some of the confusing narratives coming out about drug education priorities which lean toward normalizing or even sanitizing drug use as, ‘part of growing up’!
It is concerning for all communities and their families that pro-drug advocates have been working tirelessly to hijack our very important National Drug Strategy and create the very ‘cognitive dissonance’ we are seeing in many AOD education offerings.
What is even more concerning however, is the outcome (whether intended or not) of sending a strong tacit message to our young people that drug use is somehow ‘normal’ or at least, a phase of experimentation that is normal. Messages that clearly undercut this primary prevention vehicle of drug use being wrong, The reason for this undercutting appear varied and also concerning.
Consequently, the emerging generation are being primed by this ‘messaging’ along with an increasingly consistent indifference to adolescent drug use that either ignores best practice of prevention, demand reduction and abstinence or worse; actively mocks these positions as unsophisticated or sub-culturally ‘uncool’. Subsequently this all creates the self-fulfilling predictor that kids are being primed to hear, and that is… ‘drug use is normal, a little risky, but manageable’, because some of the ‘grown ups’ are telling me it is!
Add to that, the following tactics
- Socio-behavioural undermining drivers such as couching some psychotropic toxins in a ‘medicinal’ context – thus feigning a type of legitimacy for ‘recreational’ engagement. e.g. cannabis and psychedelics.
- The ongoing misuse of legitimate de-stigmatizing vehicles, not to assist those caught in substance use, but more cynically to defend those who willing use substances for ‘recreational’ purposes.
- The touting of the damage management model of harm reduction (not prevention) as the preferred emphasis in AOD education.
- Not to mention the decriminalisation agendas that all scream at the emerging adult, (all-be-it sub-textually) that ‘drug use can’t be all that bad!’
It is important for us all to understand these advocacies and the associated conduct in the public square is all an in-kind drug ‘education’, and the pro-drug lobby knows this.
Our Children/Students have as their actual ‘Human Right’ under Article 33 Convention the Rights of the Child to be protected from all aspects of illicit drug use – all aspects. Any vehicle of mechanism that undermines or interferes with that authentic human right is at best incredibly concerning, at worst utterly egregious.
It is time that all teaching/learning environments hadDemand Reduction and Primary Prevention at the centre of all AOD education – as we do with Tobacco.
There is Only one message, one voice and one focus in the marketplace and that is Don’t Uptake or QUIT. There is no dissenting, contrary or confusing voices in any public sectors of education, medical and government policy on Tobacco, so why are we permitting this confusion in the illicit drug space?
It's time we had a ‘war for the brains, health and future’ of the emerging generation, and stop pandering to a cultural minority who continue to expend extraordinary amounts of social, intellectual, and financial capital on trying to convince the culture that drug use and the outcome of ‘getting high’ or ‘having fun’ is not only manageable, but important.
The usefulness of lived experience of the Recovering Alumni – The ex-drug user – in understanding this key protective factor cannot be understated.
Key questions that must be answered,
- What is best practice around AOD (alcohol & other drug) use for the developing brain – Prevention of damage management?
- What ‘drug education’ are your children/students being subject too?
- Why, as educators, would we permit any cognitive dissonance in our teaching/learning environments in the AOD education space?
It’s time to #preventdontpromote and work tirelessly in promoting #demandreduction
Also see
- Drug Policy: Prevent, don't promote. Part 3, Changing language: Control Language, Control Culture (What Drug Education are Your Kids Getting? Cognitive Dissonance Theory) Drug Policy: Prevent, don't promote. Part 3, Changing language: Control Language, Control Culture - YouTube Drug Policy: Prevent, don't promote. Part 3, Changing language: Control Language, Control Culture - YouTube
- Drug Policy: Prevent, don't promote. Part 2, What's in Play? Controlling language
Education Team @ Dalgarno Institute
Drug use beliefs found to be strongest predictor of youth substance use
by Marianne Stein, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
What are the most important factors to consider for developing effective drug use prevention programs? Many current programs for adolescents focus on elements including peer and family relationships, school connection, and youth's self-confidence and self-assertion. However, a new study from the University of Illinois (U of I) suggests another factor may be equally—or even more—influential: whether the youth believes drug use is wrong.
"Inherent to the success of drug use prevention programs is ensuring activities are targeting those risks and protective factors that are most influential and salient for youth substance use," says Allen Barton, assistant professor and Extension specialist in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at U of I and lead author on the study.
"As we aim to develop more effective drug use prevention programming, we have to ask whether any pertinent factors have been overlooked."
Barton and his colleagues found individual beliefs that drug use is wrong had twice the magnitude of impact compared to other risk and protective factors examined in the study. Thus, influencing adolescents' beliefs about drug use may be an important but relatively underemphasized key to modifying their behavior.
The researchers based their work on cognitive dissonance theory, which has not been used commonly to inform drug prevention efforts.
"The basic idea of cognitive dissonance theory is that individuals strive for harmony or agreement between their beliefs and their behavior. When there's a disconnect or dissonance, they try to reconcile either by changing their behavior to match their beliefs, or by changing their beliefs to allow for their behavior," Barton explains.
The researchers analyzed information from the 2018 Illinois Youth Survey, which measured risk behaviors among middle and high school students. The study included more than 128,000 youths in grades 8, 10, and 12 from schools across Illinois. Respondents noted whether and how frequently they had used alcohol, cannabis or tobacco in the past year. They also answered a range of questions about their attitudes, school, family and health.
"It is not surprising that drug use beliefs are linked to behavior; we certainly would expect a correlation between them. What's most noticeable is the magnitude of the effect, particularly in comparison to more established factors included in the analyses," Barton states.
In the survey, youth were asked how wrong they think it is for someone their age to consume alcohol or drugs, ranking from "not wrong at all" to "very wrong" on a four-point scale. For each unit increase in response, the likelihood of past-year drug abstinence increased by 39% for 8th graders, 50% for 10th graders, and 53% for 12th graders.
Beliefs not only correlated strongly with past usage, but also with frequency of use.
"Even among individuals who used drugs in the past year, individual beliefs that drug use is wrong were associated with less frequent use," Barton says.
The researchers found parents' beliefs also had a protective effect, albeit smaller than individual beliefs, while peer acceptance of drug usage was a risk factor. Perhaps more surprisingly, parental communication about drugs was associated with higher usage.
"These conversations may be happening because parents are already suspicious that youth are using drugs or trying to experiment," Barton notes. He suggests parents might want to speak with their kids about drugs at an earlier age, perhaps during the middle school years, rather than wait until they perceive a problem.
The study's findings can inform research and prevention efforts in various ways, the scientists say. First steps are to investigate how youths' beliefs about drug use are formed and influenced. Practitioners might also consider how they can support parents and caregivers in transmitting their beliefs to youth.
"Our work suggests this is a construct that warrants more attention in both the research and practice communities as it demonstrates a strong protective effect when it comes to drug use," Barton says. "As we are trying to improve drug use prevention programming for youth, these results suggest it may be useful to think about how educators, mentors, and parents can help instill the belief that drug use is wrong."
RESEARCH: Adolescent Substance Use and Individual Beliefs That Drug Use Is Wrong: A State-wide Epidemiological Study
Pages 640-648 | Published online: 10 Feb 2022
Abstract
Objective: Informed by cognitive dissonance theory, the current study investigated the ability of youths’ belief that drug use is wrong to predict likelihood of past year substance use abstinence as well as frequency of use at grades 8, 10, and 12.
Method: Study analyses were executed from a statewide epidemiological survey of more than 125,000 youth using multi-group Zero-Inflated Poisson regression modeling.
Results: Personal belief that drug use is wrong demonstrated the largest magnitude of effect at each grade among the individual, family, and school-based factors under examination; this finding emerged with respect to predicting past year substance use abstinence as well as rates of substance use among individuals reporting past year use. Although differences across grades were evident for the magnitude of effect within various risk and protective factors, the rank ordering in magnitude of effect between factors was consistent across grades 8, 10, and 12.
Conclusion: Current results underscore the salience of youths’ belief that drug use is wrong in explaining likelihood of past year substance use at multiple time points during adolescence.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10826084.2022.2034877?journalCode=isum20