Prevention Does Begin at Home

Children and adolescents receive substance abuse prevention messages from various sources throughout their daily lives, from school-based programs, media PSA’s, neighborhood groups and, hopefully, from their parents.  Our aim in this analysis was to examine the efficacy of some of these sources of prevention messages in influencing an adolescent to decide not to use alcohol or other drugs in the future, and to determine if this decision moderated the relationship between inherited liability for future substance use and level of drug use at age 19.

Study participants were N=258 children from the Center for Education and Drug Abuse Research who were aged 10-12 at study entry and were prospectively followed to age 19. Inherited risk was established using the Transmissible Liability Index (TLI) at age 10-12. At age 15-16, participants were asked how many lifetime prevention messages they had received from parents, school, media, peers, neighborhood, and health care providers about the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs. Participants were then asked if they made a decision not to use drugs based on those messages. Level of drug use at age 19 was assessed using the Drug Use Screening Inventory (DUSI) self-report questionnaire, summing the monthly drug use across drug categories and frequency of use.

Path analyses using MPlus did not indicate any moderation effects of source of prevention messages or decision to not use drugs at age 15-16 on the relationship between liability at age 10-12 and level of drug use at age 19.  Ordinal regression analyses were conducted with level of drug use outcomes. Results indicated that the number of prevention messages from parents (Parameter Estimate=.211, Wald=5.713, p=.017, CI=.038, .384) and the decision to not use drugs as a result of the prevention messages from school (PE=-.854, Wald=6.696, p=.010, CI=-1.501, -.207), and from parents (PE=-.951, Wald=7.287, p=.007, CI=-1.642, -.207) were the best predictors of less drug use at age 19.

Although the prevention messages did not moderate the relationship between liability for drug use and level of use at age 19, our findings show that parental prevention messages at age 15-16 can significantly impact reduced substance use at age 19, suggesting the value of supporting active parental involvement in prevention efforts. This research also provides evidence necessitating a re-examination of prevention messages from other sources as to how they might be tailored to reach those children at greatest risk for future drug use.