Introduction
Concerns about drugs, alcohol and tobacco use have existed for a long time. Apart from looking for means to treat those who have suffered from their use, other measures have been employed in an attempt to prevent more people from falling victim to drugs and alcohol use. Most of the programs that have been established to fight this menace mainly focus on school children. Various programs have been developed in a bid to teach children the negative implications of their use. They are aimed at reducing the chances of students engaging in alcohol, drugs, and tobacco consumption at a tender age. Despite the numerous efforts in educating children on the implications of drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, there has not been a clear consensus on the appropriate methods to use in delivering the intended information. However, most of the used approaches have been seen to greatly concentrate on educating children on the effects of alcohol and drug use (Dunn and Goldman, 1998, PP. 579-585).
Many teachers understand that drugs and alcohol use among students is the major reason why many students do not accomplish their educational goals. In addition, most states authorize that every curriculum should ensure that it includes topics touching on drugs, alcohol, and tobacco use and their effects. For instance, the United States department of education has established programs aimed at discouraging drug and alcohol use among school children. For the curriculum to succeed there is a need for all stakeholders ranging from teachers, parents, and children to be involved in its development. This is because students do not only use drugs and alcohol when at school but also when they are on holiday. Involving parents and community helps in them assisting children to keep off from drug abuse when at home. Schools are perceived as the most convenient places to conduct this education since it is possible to access most of the teenagers who are at the risk of indulging in drug use. In the past, drug, alcohol, and tobacco education was disseminated to students by presenting realistic information about drugs and other substances to the students. Instructors could dramatize the dangers of using these substances to trigger fear among students for them not to get involved in drug use. This included the use of lectures and printed Medias to convey information to students. With time various advanced programs have been developed.
Education on drug, alcohol, and tobacco use
Education programs have been seen to portray clear facts about drugs and alcohol such as the physical properties of drugs and nicknames used for the drugs to ensure that children clearly understand the drugs being addressed. However, the programs have failed to greatly focus on the effects of these drugs on behavior and the health of people. According to recent research, it was revealed that children try to learn their surroundings by coming up with intuitive theories. From this research, programs have been developed to try and see whether children at an early age can be able to learn a theory of implications of drugs and other illicit. A causally rational approach to education has been developed in an attempt to see whether it would be effective in improving children’s understanding and beliefs about the effects of drugs and alcohol taking. In addition, the approach is aimed at helping children change their attitudes and intentions regarding alcohol and drug use.
The reason behind coming up with programs that try to explain drugs’ implications to children stems from intuitive theory ideologies. The theory expounds on the development of understanding among children. According to this approach, children’s awareness in any field is greatly qualified as hypothetical in the manner and is modeled around the vital contributory factors. Gelman and William assert that an intuitive theory specifies a range of entities, describes the various factors that have led to the presence of these entities, and builds up information regarding the entire phenomenon.
Children assume the role of theorists who pursue to explain the cause of certain phenomena such as the reason why a person staggers after taking alcohol. Research has proved that education programs developed under the guideline of the intuitive theories model of cognitive development are becoming effective. For example, Sigelman showed that curriculum describing how people contract Human Immunodeficiency Syndrome (HIV), and how it affects people’s health greatly help in children understanding how the disease is transmitted. Children also changed the attitude they had on people suffering from the disease (Dunn and Goldman, 2000, PP. 1639–1646).
Systematically presenting events according to how one event leads to another enhances learning among children. Children are capable of understanding intended information as well as retaining it in their minds. This has led to the development of a drug education curriculum that incorporates drugs particulars into a consistent, temporally reasonable explanation thus helping students better understand and memorize the information. Another technique that has been used in educating youths on the impacts of drugs and other substance use is the competence enhancement approach. The technique realizes that some youths indulge in alcohol and drug use not because of peer influence but due to their attributing drugs to some influential values such as controlling anxiety or boosting self-esteem. This technique tries to understand the behavior of alcohol and drug abuse by coming up with varied models and imitations. It is employed in situations where youths have prior knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs on drug abuse. Even though the approach has some similarities with other techniques, a unique feature of this approach is that it insists on educating youths about common individual self-management skills as well as social coping skills. Some of these skills include decision making, cognitive skills for rejecting peer and media influence, how to develop self-esteem, and common boldness skills (Dunn and Goldman, 1996, PP. 209-217).
Drug Abuse Resistant Education (DARE)
One of the education programs that have been established in the fight against drugs is Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) which is greatly employed within Canada. DARE is a primary, or worldwide prevention program. It targets children and youth before or around the age of experimentation and the first use of drugs in late childhood to mid-adolescence. Preventing and reducing the commencement of drug use in the first place among children remains a central principle of drug policies around the world. It is the first line of defense to the spread of drug problems in families, schools, and communities. It is the only constituent of drug policy that directly affects the prevalence or the rate of occurrence of new cases of drug use. By its very definition, primary prevention focuses on young people and on those systems that influence them. Some organizations in Canada have attempted in recent years to focus on preventing what they refer to as problematic drug use. This is a befuddling term that confuses the meaning of primary prevention. Fascinatingly, other countries have not followed suit. It remains a universal basis of drug policy that the first step to preventing problems with drugs is to reduce or prevent the start of use in the first place. This was certainly found to be the case in a comprehensive review of drug policies around the world conducted a few years ago by one of the authors. It is risky indeed to attempt to distinguish use from difficult use especially among such a susceptible population as a youth. Indeed, youth are going through a critical period of social, emotional, cognitive, and physiological development. The research is too numerous to cite that drugs affect youth both directly through pharmacological effects and indirectly through their impact on what youth do, and do not do, during this stage of life. The fact that some youth use drugs and appear at least not to be bothered by them does not change this fact. It is defensible then, to work to help young people make healthy choices in matters of drugs and this includes foremost the decision not to use drugs at all (Rosenbaum and Hanson, 1998, PP. 381-412).
Recently, research in Canada has affirmed that focusing on non-use is not only wise from a developmental point of view, but also in terms of pedagogy and community, family, and school acceptance. Christiane Poulin at Dalhousie University, working with others, compared abstinence-based approaches with harm minimization approaches in secondary schools in Nova Scotia. They found that true to common sense, younger and middle teens were less able to make clear distinctions between what might be useful and what might be misuse, of substances. As well, parents, students, and school personnel alike considered a self-restraint message, not a message of control or non-problematic use, the suitable message. DARE supports non-use by helping students consider the established risks of drug use and deal with peers and other influences that are relatively powerful at this time of their lives. DARE, especially in its updated form, also focuses directly and indirectly on such known protective factors as adult role modeling, mentoring, relations to responsible adults in the community, peer support, reduced violence, pro-social activities, making successful transitions, and skill in problem-solving and communication. The support DARE lends to the non-use option is well supported by pharmacology, what we know about social and emotional development, and community philosophy (Dinh, Sarason, Peterson and Onstad, 1995, 32-40).
Some critics of DARE and prevention generally, say that these programs are ineffective because they do not prevent young people from using drugs. These criticisms are based on evaluations of programs, including DARE, that suggests that they do not achieve significant and sustained reductions in commencement of use.
Because DARE has been evaluated more than perhaps any other program in use today, it has received more such criticism. What these evaluations fail to take into account, and what the critics fail to recognize, is that no single program can be expected to achieve end-stage change by itself. Namely, no one component in prevention is sufficient in and of itself to reduce the incidence of drug use. This fact was acknowledged two decades ago and affirmed as an important attribute to remember about school health education in general. Speaking of school health education in 1982, Lloyd Kolbe, Chief of Health Promotion at the Centres for Disease Control in the US, named five key purposes of school health. These were increasing awareness about individual and societal health among the youths, rising one’s decision-making skills about health behaviors as well as improving individuals’ powers to engage in favorable health behaviors and to help persons in their efforts to change health behavior. Also helping people develop skills to improve the health of their families and the society.
He recognized, as we now recognize, that school curricula cannot be anticipated to do everything alone. But by increasing knowledge, understanding, and skills, contribute to the well-being of students and hopefully, add to a greater whole of prevention and health promotion in the community, province, and nation. DARE does make such a contribution (Tobler and Stratton, 1997, PP. 71-128).
Drawbacks of education programs
One of the major drawbacks of the present drug education curriculums is their lack to address the effects of drug abuse and how they occur when teaching children. This has been attributed to the assumption by people that students might not be cognitively ready to take in such information. The public fears that conveying such information to children, would arouse their curiosity leading to them indulging in the use of drugs. Education has been seen to instill a lot of knowledge in children but poorly effective in helping them change their perceptions and behaviors. This is because they have been brought up in an environment that has greatly condemned the use of drugs. However, there is a need for programs to concentrate on ensuring that they have helped children in changing their attitudes towards the use of drugs. Children’s curiosity about the behavioral effects of tobacco, alcohol, and other substances generally increases as they grow. This usually starts when they are in post-elementary school. Children who believe that drugs and other substances have more positive than adverse effects within their lives are greatly susceptible to indulging in their use (Bridges, Sigelman, Brewster, Leach, Mack, Rinehart and Sorongon, 2003, PP. 19-44).
Overcoming the drawbacks
. Current evidence suggests best practices in school-based substance abuse education should focus on strengthening life skills, particularly skills in handling social situations and immunization to peer influences and being able to think critically, and reinforcing and fostering protective factors or developmental assets both within students and in the systems in which they live (family, school, community). Other best practices include promoting positive school experience and bonding, helping students to internalize what is learned rather than to see it as remote information that is not particularly relevant. This latter means involving students versus lecturing to them
Current programs are aimed at discouraging students from using drugs, alcohol, and tobacco as early as when they are in their mid-elementary school levels. This is by informing them on how drugs and alcohol consumption may be detrimental to their brains leading to them being incapable of controlling their behaviors. The programs assume that children who have been taught the effects of drugs can be able to come up with a clear understanding of its adverse effects better than those who have not undergone any training. Such children may be in a position to desist from drugs as they readily know of their implications (Bauman, 1986, PP.1635–1647).
Many adolescents do not understand that taking a single dose of a drug such as a methamphetamine could lead to severe complications within their brains, body or even lead to them losing their life. By conveying such information to them, it would lead to them getting rid of drugs. However, this can only be effective if teens get and believe the information. There is a need for instructors to develop a good relationship with their children for the children to be able to comply with their instructions. Many teens do not believe that they can get addicted to alcohol, drugs, or tobacco use to an extent that they can not be able to control their behavior. As a result, they are tempted to experiment. Instructors need to encourage teens against experimenting with harmful drugs such as methamphetamine by helping them learn about the relationship between addiction and loss of personal drive. They need to be explained that by experimenting, they risk themselves getting addicted to these substances (Bangert-Drowns, 1988, PP. 243-265).
Most of the programs that have been proven to be effective in fighting drugs, alcohol, and tobacco use among youths will not be effective unless they are widely implemented. Today, these programs have not been widely implemented. Most of the programs being used have not proved very effective while others have not been evaluated to determine their effectiveness. This underlines the need for the establishment of how to adopt, institutionalize and employ these programs on large scale. Follow-up needs to be made to ensure that programs are implemented efficiently. No matter how effective programs might be, if not well implemented they would have no effect in curbing drug abuse among youths.
Conclusion
The success of drug, alcohol, and tobacco education has not been encouraging. Although there has been some progress, programs have not proved to be greatly effective while others have not been consistent in their effectiveness. Areas in which the programs have been effective are in disseminating knowledge on the effects of drugs among children. Programs have not managed to change the children’s attitude concerning drug use. They have rarely shown significant improvement in behavior change. The method of their approach and failure to incorporate various approaches within the programs are some of the reasons why the programs have not managed to improve attitudes and behaviors among the youths. Other reasons that have led to programs not being effective are not setting specific goals for the programs. This has made it hard to determine the effectiveness of the programs as there are no clear objectives. Some programs have been developed in a way that they do not meet students’ needs thus perceiving them as not important. The use of incompetent instructors in educating youths has also been another factor that has led to the programs not being effective (Drug Strategies, 1999, PP. 25-40).
These problems have been addressed in current education programs. The programs have emphasized the need to comprehensively cover alcohol and drugs abuse among teens. There has been the development of a curriculum that deals with drug abuse as early as when a child is in kindergarten. This is aimed at helping children grow aware of drugs implications to avoid falling victims in the future. The programs have also acknowledged the responsibility of the community in fighting this problem. As a result, it has come up with parenting programs and community crusades to support school-based programs.
Reference
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