A review of school drug policies and their impact on youth substance use

Abstract

Youth substance use is an important social and health problem in the United States, Australia and other Western nations. Schools are recognized as important sites for prevention efforts and school substance use policies are a key component of health promotion in schools. The first part of this paper reviews the known status of school policies on tobacco, alcohol and other illicit drugs in a number of Western countries and the existing evidence for the effectiveness of school drug policy in preventing drug use. The review shows that most schools in developed countries have substance use policies but that there is substantial variation in the comprehensiveness of these policies (i.e. the breadth of people, places and times of day that are explicitly subject to policy prohibitions), and the orientation of their enforcement (e.g. punitive versus remedial), both across and within schools. The few studies of policy impact focus solely on tobacco policy and provide preliminary evidence that more comprehensive and strictly enforced school policies are associated with less smoking. The second part of the paper introduces the International Youth Development Study, a new longitudinal research project aimed at comparing school policies and the developmental course of youth drug use in the United States, where drug policies are abstinence-based, with Australia, which has adopted a harm minimization approach to drug policy.

Drug and Alcohol Abuse Prevention Education in Selected Secondary Schools in Zambia: Policy Guidelines used

“…This clarification clearly showed that there was lack of a specific document on drug prevention policy in the selected secondary schools. This finding is contrary to what is generally obtained in most parts of the developed world, as a study review conducted by Evans-Whipp et al (2004) shows that most schools in the developed countries have written drug and alcohol abuse prevention policies.School drug and alcohol abuse prevention policies are important because they inform practice and ultimately they form part of the broader drug and alcohol abuse prevention education strategy. Lack of comprehensive policy guidelines may contribute to non-achievement of prevention goals in the school.…”

School Context Variables and Students’ Smoking

“…This is an interesting finding as previous research emphasizes the importance of monitoring and sanctioning of smoking rules rather than the formal existence of a smoking ban [18] . Perhaps this finding is due to the fact that in previous studies there is hardly considerable variation in the existence of student smoking restrictions because such policies are highly prevalent in most countries [26] . In Germany, however, complete smoking bans at schools (especially for older students) are much rarer, as there is no national legislation on that topic.…”

Deterioration of academic achievement and marijuana use onset among rural adolescents

“…The World Health Organization has developed standards and recommendations for health promoting schools, and this framework has been broadly adopted in Europe and Australia [49]. Flay [50] also advocates for comprehensive health promotion programming in schools, an approach which considers the whole studentincluding academic achievement, commitment to school and pro-social development.…”