Life Skills Training Shields Teens From Prescription
Opioid Misuse e Life Skills Training (LST) prevention intervention, delivered in 7th grade classrooms, helps children avoid misusing prescription opioids throughout their teen years, NIDA-supported researchers report. Coupling LST with the Strengthening Families Program: for Parents and Youth 10–14 (SFP) enhances this protection. Dr. D. Max Crowley from Duke University, with colleagues from Pennsylvania State University, evaluated the impacts of LST and two other school-based interventions, All Stars (AS) and Project Alert (PA), on teens’ prescription opioid misuse. e researchers drew the data for the evaluation from a recent trial of the PROmoting School-community-university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience (PROSPER) prevention program. PROSPER is led jointly by Richard Spoth at Iowa State University and Mark Greenberg at Penn State University, with research funding from NIDA. In the PROSPER trial, 14 communities in Iowa and Pennsylvania each selected, from among LST, AS, and PA, the intervention they felt best t their resources and their youths’ risk pro le for drug use and other unhealthy and delinquent behaviors. e interventions are all “universal,” meaning that they are delivered to all children, not just those who are judged to have elevated risk for problems. All the interventions involve multiple sessions of classroom instruction addressing the social and psychological factors that lead to experimentation with drugs and other undesirable behaviors. In addition, through games, discussion, role-playing, and other exercises, students practice refusing drugs, communicating with peers and adults, making choices in problem situations, and confronting peer pressure. e programs’ curricula focus on helping students to develop practical skills they can apply to resist drug use. Materials such as worksheets, online content, posters, and videos augment all three programs. Each intervention was delivered to all 7th graders in the schools of the PROSPER communities that selected it.
Most of the children and their families also received the SFP program during the prior year, when the children were in 6th grade. In SFP, families gather together to watch videos providing advice and instruction toward enhancing family relationships and communication, fostering parenting skills, improving academic performance, and preventing risky behaviors. Group leaders then conduct follow-up lessons and practice exercises. Dr. Crowley and colleagues previously reported that smaller percentages of children from the 14 PROSPER communities reported illicit drug use and problematic alcohol use in annual follow-up visits conducted through 11th grade, compared to children from 14 matched control communities that did not use any evidence-based prevention program. As well, fewer PROSPER children reported marijuana use in 12th grade. In their new analysis, the researchers isolated the e ects of the three interventions on misuse of prescription opioids. eir analysis showed that LST-only recipients were less likely to report ever having misused these medications than were children in control communities, throughout middle and high school. e prevalence advantage with LST reached 20.2 percent versus 25.9 percent in 12th grade. Pairing LST with SFP increased the advantage to 16.3 percent versus 25.9 percent in 12th grade. This work illustrates that not only can existing universal prevention programs effectively prevent prescription drug misuse, they can also do so in a cost-effective manner. Our research demonstrates the unique opportunities to combine prevention across school and family settings to augment the larger prevention impact.
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