Drug Education News

Mary Brett, writing as a spokesperson for Europe Against Drugs, in the BMJ says:

A strong prevention campaign supported by the whole population can work. In 1979 the “Just say no” campaign started in the United States. By 1991 the 23 million drug users had been reduced to 14 million. Cocaine and cannabis use halved.  Surveys at the time found over 70% of adolescents abstained from using cannabis because of fear of the physical or psychological damage, 60% because of parental disapproval, and 40% because of the law (PRIDE (Parents Resource Institute for Drug Education), world drug prevention conference, US 1987).

When the U.S. Government Accountability Office looked at drug prevention in 1991 it said that the government had chosen to fund:

programs with a no-use approach towards drug abuse prevention, despite a lack of evidence demonstrating the superiority of this approach over others. Since neither recognition effort is governed by specific statutes, however, the agencies have the discretion to set limits on their recognition efforts. GAO also found that, in addition to considering only general no-use approaches, the Department of Education also appeared to give preference to a set of specific prevention strategies (such as resistance skills training, self-esteem enhancement, and in-school curricula in general) that, while among those with promise, are not the only ones supported by the literature (which, for example, also cites peer programs and alternatives programs).

They concluded:

that the search for effective drug abuse prevention programs will be most effective, and public confidence in the results of these federal recognition efforts will be greatest, if their policies are broadened to permit review of any type of promising program and their procedures are revised to increase the emphasis on evidence of effectiveness.

While looking around to see what evaluations had been undertaken on “Just Say No” approaches to  drug education I did come across this paper, which looks at:

when governments should to try to discourage consumption of goods through advertising, like the “just say no” campaign against drug use. Our analysis implies that advertising campaigns can be useful against illegal goods that involve enforcement expenditures to discourage production. However, they are generally not desirable against legal goods when consumption is discouraged through optimal monetary taxes.

However, I don’t understand enough about the equations involved to judge whether the authors are endorsing a “just say no” message, but I think they are just suggesting there is efficacy in having public health campaigns against illegal products:

Illegal goods like drugs have two classes of policy instruments: enforcement and punishment strategies that reduce consumption by raising the real costs and prices of supplying the goods, and expenditures on “education,” “advertising,” and “ persuasion” that reduce demand for these goods. If π represents these expenditures, the social value function W in eq. (10) would be modified to

W= V(Q(E, π), π) - P(E)Q(E, π p) - c(π).

In this equation, c(π) is the cost of producing  units of persuasion against consuming Q, and for simplicity we ignore enforcement costs (C). We allow W to depend directly on  as well as indirectly through ’s effect on Q.

There’s more, but I’ll spare you it here.