Drug misuse comes with serious health problems, including an increased risk of addiction. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, long-term use of drugs can lead to heart or lung disease, cancer, mental health issues, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, and other diseases while short-term use can cause heart attack, stroke, psychosis, overdose, and death.
The good news is that drug misuse is preventable. Prevention addresses the root causes behind drug use, protects our families and young people, and stops addiction before it starts.
What is Prevention?
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, prevention helps people develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills they need to make good choices or change harmful behaviors.
Prevention is one part of the continuum of behavioral health. The other parts are promotion, treatment, and recovery. All are critical elements of a robust behavioral healthcare system, but each one has its own unique role.
Inside the continuum of behavioral health, prevention is universal, selective, or indicated.
It’s important to know that prevention is different from harm reduction. Harm reduction seeks to minimize or remove the consequences of drug misuse while prevention aims to stop drug misuse from occurring. Harm reduction is not prevention.
Factors of Prevention
Like many diseases, no two addictions are alike. While everyone is susceptible to addiction, there are certain risk and protective factors that influence a person’s likelihood of becoming addicted. These factors can each be further divided into three categories—individual, environmental, and genetic.
Individual
Parental misuse of drugs, history of trauma, and a lack of social attachment.
Environmental
Availability of drugs in the area exposure to violence and community poverty.
Genetic
Family history of substance use disorder can account for half of a person's likelihood of developing an addiction.
For each risk factor, there is a corresponding protective factor. According to NIDA, risk and protective factors include:
| Risk Factors | Protective Factors |
| Aggressive behavior in childhood | Good self-control |
| Lack of parental supervision | Parental monitoring and support |
| Drug experimentation | Positive relationship |
| Availability of drugs at school | Anti-drug policies at school |
| Community poverty | Neighborhood resources |
Strategies for Prevention
There are six strategies for primary prevention activities, according to SAMHSA’s Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. They are:
Information dissemination
Provides awareness and knowledge of the nature and extent of drug misuse and its effects.
Education
Improves participants' life and social skills through interactive communication, not just information delivery.
Alternatives
Offers drug-free activities to meet participants' needs without turning to substances like alcohol or tobacco.
Environmental
Establishes or changes community standards, codes, and attitudes to influence the misuse of drugs in a community.
Community-based process
Enhances the ability of the community to provide prevention and treatment services.
Problem identification
and referral
Identifies early drug misuse to assess if education can change behavior, offering intervention before treatment is needed.
A Word on Scare Tactics
Scare tactics emphasize the worst dangers of drug use to create fear and anxiety in the hopes that fear alone will prevent or stop risky behaviors. Scare tactics seem intuitive to us as adults. After all, we intentionally avoid situations that frighten us or make us worry that we’ll be harmed.
Accordingly, a lot of prevention has been built around making drug use seem as frightening and harmful as possible. Mock car crashes, gruesome scenes, images of people before and after drug addiction, graphic depictions of death and drug use, auditorium speakers who share how drug use ruined their lives, videos of dead, drunk drivers being scraped off the road, and other frightening messages are all scare tactics. Unfortunately, despite all the creativity, energy, and money spent on these tactics, research has consistently shown that scare tactics don’t work in preventing substance misuse.
Prevention and Adolescents
Adolescence is a time of transition, and transitions increase the risk of drug misuse. When a teenager moves homes, suffers a divorce in the family, or changes schools, they are more likely to seek out drugs as a coping tool. They also face greater stressors than they did in elementary school, and they are more likely to engage in risky behaviors, like misusing drugs than adults.
The harmful effects of drug misuse are also greater for adolescents. Their brains are still developing, and that makes teens’ brains more likely to be disrupted by drug use. In fact, the earlier someone misuses drugs, the more likely they are to become addicted to them.
Of those who have an addiction or substance abuse disorder, 90% of them began using drugs under the age of 18
Because of these risks, prevention is the best strategy for addressing addiction, according to NIDA. There are many evidence-based programs that have been proven to improve the protective factors and to minimize risk factors for drug use in adolescents.