{"id":3204,"date":"2022-04-08T13:48:28","date_gmt":"2022-04-08T03:48:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dalgarnoinstitute.org.au\/wp_site\/protective-factor-number-one-in-drug-use-prevention-science\/"},"modified":"2022-04-08T13:48:28","modified_gmt":"2022-04-08T03:48:28","slug":"protective-factor-number-one-in-drug-use-prevention-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dalgarnoinstitute.org.au\/wp_site\/protective-factor-number-one-in-drug-use-prevention-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Protective Factor Number One in Drug Use Prevention Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

Protective Factor Number One in Drug Use Prevention Science: <\/strong>In Denying or Delaying Uptake of Substances the Key Protective Factor for Your Children\/Students is the \u201cBelief that Drug are Bad\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Latest research out of University of Illinois, and not before time, has published what has been intuitively known for decades \u2013 That is that the key, and it would appear overarching, protective factor against substance use uptake is the \u2018Belief that drug use is wrong\u2019. <\/em><\/strong>(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)<\/p>\n

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. <\/em><\/strong>Thus, influencing adolescents’ beliefs about drug use may be an important but relatively underemphasized key to modifying their behavior.<\/p>\n

The researchers analyzed information from the 2018 Illinois Youth Survey, which measured risk behaviors among middle and <\/em>high school students<\/em><\/a>. 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

“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.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Beliefs not only correlated strongly with past usage, but also with frequency of use.<\/em><\/p>\n

“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.<\/em>1<\/sup><\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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, \u2018part of growing up\u2019!<\/p>\n

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<\/strong><\/a> and create the very \u2018cognitive dissonance\u2019 we are seeing in many AOD education offerings. <\/p>\n

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 \u2018normal\u2019 or at least, a phase of experimentation that is normal.<\/em> Messages that clearly undercut this primary prevention vehicle of drug use being wrong<\/em>, The reason for this undercutting appear varied and also concerning.<\/p>\n

Consequently, the emerging generation are being primed by this \u2018messaging\u2019 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 \u2018uncool\u2019. Subsequently this all creates the self-fulfilling predictor that kids are being primed to hear, and that is\u2026 \u2018drug use is normal, a little risky, but manageable\u2019, because some of the \u2018grown ups\u2019 are telling me it is!<\/em><\/p>\n

Add to that, the following tactics<\/p>\n