Reuters: Fewer U.S. Teens Participating in Substance Abuse Prevention Programs

BUSSW associate professor Christopher Salas-Wright explains what’s behind the recent drop in substance use prevention programming.

August 22, 2019 | By Tamara Mathias, Reuters Health

The following text is an excerpt.

(Reuters Health) – Fewer U.S. adolescents are participating in programs designed to prevent substance abuse, a study suggests.

Participation in these programs has dropped significantly since the early 2000s, researchers found.

While 48% of adolescents attended prevention programs in 2002-2003, only 40% did so in 2015-2016, the researchers report in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

That’s a 16.5% decline, Christopher Salas-Wright of the Boston University School of Social Work and his colleagues note.

In particular, participation dropped among Latino youth and youth from rural areas and economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

The findings are drawn from the long-standing National Survey on Drug Use and Health. An interviewer typically brings a laptop to participants’ homes, so they can complete the survey privately.

With federal funding for substance abuse prevention nearly halved between 2005 and 2015, Salas-Wright told Reuters Health, it “certainly seems intuitive” that funding cuts were partly responsible for the drop in participation. However, the study did not specifically examine this question.

The Trump Administration last year suspended the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices, a searchable database that helped people find intervention methods to prevent and treat mental illness and substance use disorders.

Until the suspension, “states were able to pick from an extensive list of approved model programs,” study co-author Flavio Marsiglia said in an email.

“Policymakers at different levels of government may have switched resources away from universal prevention in schools, in part to respond to the opioid epidemic,” Marsiglia said. […]

Full article from Reuters Health: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-youth-substance-abuse/fewer-u-s-teens-participating-in-substance-abuse-prevention-programs-idUSKCN1VC1Q9