Regional Coalition for Campaign against Drug Abuse (RCCADA), is a drug-free community alliance established to curb and lower the irresponsible use of drugs in Los Angeles. Concurrently, as a coalition, RCCADA is propelled by local circumstances to execute local remedies that will create a comfortable, decent, and drug-free society. Skid Row neighborhood, which is the area of interest, is believed to be the core of Los Angeles’ drug addiction problem. There is an estimation of more than 12,000 methamphetamine and alcohol addicts every year (National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), 2018). National Institute On Drug Abuse (NIDA), revealed that there was an increase in methamphetamine prevalence indicators, established on the number of treatment admissions and National Forensic Laboratory Information System (NFLIS) drug reports in the second half of 2018 (NIDA, 2018). RCCADA intends to involve various stakeholders in the prevention plan, they include: patients or drug abusers, community prevention organizers, local police, and treatment consultants. The participants’ contributions will help in generating a drug abuse prevention plan that enables members of the community to develop the understanding, mastery, and personalities to appreciate the benefits of living a drug-free and healthy life.
The vision of RCCADA is to create a decent, energetic community that is abuse-free of alcohol and other harmful drugs. Its mission is to be a powerful communal voice for advocating for a safe and drug-free environment for residents in Los Angeles. Moreover, the objectives involve enhancing and expanding efforts to deal with the specific problems of alcohol and drug use by Skid Row residents and bolstering and mobilizing alliance that promotes community efforts to encourage and execute effective, research-based prevention strategies. Others are creating an atmosphere that facilitates drug-free lifestyles and implementing and backing evidence-based prevention, intervention, medication, and rehab programs.
Prevention Strategies
Preventing or lowering early drug use initiation, drug misuse, and the damages associated with misuse requires the execution of effective strategies and programs that address drug abuse across the lifespan. The prevention science indicates that productive prevention strategies exist, and if executed well, they can significantly lower drug abuse and connected threats to the health of the community (Ritchie, 2019). In the process of finding a way to execute prevention interventions, risk, and protective factors come into play. Risk factors, increase the probability of initiating drug use, of continuous and harmful use, and of further behavioral health troubles related to the use. On the other hand, protective factors, directly weaken the probability of drug use and behavioral health troubles or decrease the influence of risk factors on behavioral health troubles, (Edwards, 2019). RCCADA aims at executing three prevention strategies in Skid Row, which are universal, selective, and indicated.
Universal prevention strategies endeavor to lower particular health difficulties across all people in Skid Row by minimizing a variety of risk factors and emphasizing a wide extent of protective factors. Selective prevention strategies focus on particular set of groups of people who due to their exposure to risk factors, are at heightened risk of drug abuse problems. Target audiences for these selective interventions will include people living in poverty and the children of drug-abusing parents across Skid Row. Indicated prevention strategies are tailored to handle those Skid Row residents who are already implicated in dangerous behavior, such as drug abuse, or are starting to have troubles but who have not yet developed any drug abuse disorder.
Need Assessment
Housing shortages and increasing accommodation prices have rendered Skid Row, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, infamous as a center for homeless populations. In regards to these findings, numerous homeless people resort to the use of drugs as a brief relief from their life challenges. Surviving on the streets is an extremely stressful predicament, particularly not knowing when your subsequent meal or decent rest will come. Adopting drugs to manage stress can steer addiction, and that will only worsen stress in the end (Ritchie, 2019). RCCADA seeks to find more on the drug abuse problem by linking it to homelessness. It plans to engage a sample of vagrant individuals living on the streets through interviewing. Questions to ask are based on the participants’ alcohol and drug use in the past two months, regularity of use, substance dependency, and perceived need for drugs.
Capacity Building
Community readiness assessment concentrates on the willingness of the community members to fight against the use of drugs. Thus, the assessment assists in establishing a baseline, from which the community can move toward a position of effectively sustaining successful prevention strategies (Edwards, 2019). RCCADA intends to achieve the community readiness assessment through; inquiring from a small number of informed members of the Skid Row community about how the drug abuse issue has been recognized and dealt with in the past, and what the prevailing norms surrounding the issue in the community. The Coalition shall provide capacity-building training to strengthen our campaign. It aims to hire part-time local community prevention organizers to follow a written work plan organized by duties and due dates to rally community members.
Risk and Protective Factors
There are various risk and protective factors related to substance abuse in the area of concern. A drug abuse research conducted by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) (2018) has pointed out fundamental standards for prevention strategies community. These strategies are frequently developed to reinforce protective factors and to reduce risk aspects. As earlier explained, protective features are those attributed to reducing potential for drug use, while risk elements make drug use more probable (NIDA, 2018). RCCADA champions for the enhancement of protective factors, which include building powerful and constructive family bonds and encouraging parental monitoring of children’s actions and friends. Additional elements comprise urging involvement of parents in the lives of their children, promoting strong bonds with institutions, such as religious alliances, and adopting established norms about drug use. Risk factors to recognize consist of violent home settings, especially in which parents abuse drugs, inappropriate parenting, particularly with children possessing difficult attitudes or behavior disorders, and inadequacy of parent-child attachments and nurturing. Additionally, RCCADA will focus on bad social coping capabilities, associations with friends exhibiting mischievous behaviors, and perceptions of endorsement of drug-using behaviors in peer and community environments.
Developing and Implementing the Action Plan
A community prevention action plan should deliver substantial steps and strategies to the members. Media advocacy is an important element of this plan to encourage community policymakers, parents, and neighborhood members to be engaged in community deterrence interventions (Ritchie, 2019). RCCADA intends to utilize media advocacy, which involves the use of news media and other local forms of public communication to promote a social or public policy drive. This shall be achieved through working with Skid Row local news outlets such as radios, newspapers, and magazines to increase local attention on drug abuse problems and solutions. The trained community prevention organizers shall also be involved in disseminating the information to the community members.
Evaluation
RCCADA intends to use a structured interviewer-administered questionnaire with questions formulated precisely for drug use study to collect data. Our target interviewees include; active drug users and ex-drug users. Interviews shall be audiotaped with the interviewee’s approval. This is essential to enable research team to examine that answers have been accurately documented on the questionnaire and that the interview has been administered in accordance with the research procedure (Sileyew, 2019). Snowball sampling is a productive way of developing a large sample from a hidden community like drug users or sex workers, where no proper sampling frame is available (Sileyew, 2019). A snowball-sampling technique shall be utilized for recruitment of interview participants.
Evaluating and communicating results are important to aid mobilization and find out whether community transformation is happening. Furthermore, a fundamental factor of a sustainability plan is to share evaluation results with key community stakeholders and prevention advocates (Edwards, 2019). RCCADA baseline results on community willingness and capacity-building communicated to key Skid Row community stakeholders can steer training and specialized assistance provided to the community prevention organizers. Moreover, baseline results on the abusive use of drugs can elicit local attention and, later, evaluation impact results furnish information on success or failure and whether the intervention elements are worth sustaining. Finally, with the information gathered, RCCADA shall develop a sustainability system that underscores strong interagency structures, formal connections, aids, prevention, champions, and prevention expertise to proceed with addressing drug abuse.
References
Edwards, R., D. (2019). Substance Abuse. Web.
National Institute on Drug Abuse. (2018). Understanding drug use and addiction drug facts. National Institutes of Health. Web.
Ritchie, H. (2019) Drug Use. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Web.
Sileyew, J. (2019). Research Design and Methodology. Web.