Eighteen months after the start of the program, called Project ALERT, the number of new smokers in seventh and eighth grades and the number of students who smoked occasionally or regularly both dropped, according to Phyllis Ellickson, Ph.D., and colleagues at RAND Health.
The program also reduced the level of alcohol misuse like binge drinking by 24 percent, but it did not affect the number of new alcohol drinkers or reduce the number of occasional and regular drinkers, say the researchers.
"Curbing … alcohol use is difficult in societies where drinking is widespread and socially acceptable," Ellickson and colleagues observe.
The number of new marijuana users also decreased by 24 percent in schools that used Project ALERT, although the program did not affect marijuana use by occasional and regular users.
The researchers say their findings counter critics who claim that school programs fail to reach youth who already smoke and drink.
"These early smokers and drinkers have substantially elevated risks for increased drug use and a variety of other high-risk behaviors, such as violence, unsafe sex and dropping out of school. Hence, they are precisely the youth who need help the most," Ellickson says.
"Drug prevention programs in schools are a critical element of the anti-drug effort, yet only 9 percent of school districts are using programs whose effectiveness has been demonstrated through rigorous research," she adds.
The ALERT curriculum includes games, videos, small group lessons and a home component, all designed to change students' ideas about who uses drugs and to give them skills and motivation to resist drug use.
Ellickson and colleagues studied ALERT's effectiveness among 4,276 students. At the beginning of the study, almost 60 percent of the students had tried alcohol, about 33 percent had smoked a cigarette and 7 percent had used marijuana.
The study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
BY BECKY HAM, SCIENCE WRITER
HEALTH BEHAVIOR NEWS SERVICE
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American Journal of Public Health