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Limited impacts in seven-nation European drug education trial

December 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The largest European drug education trial ever conducted tested whether US-style social influence programmes would prove effective in Europe. There were probably some real successes, but these were limited and may have been artefacts of the implementation and analysis of the study.

Extract

Funded at European level by the European Commission, the European Drug Addiction Prevention trial (EU-Dap) aimed to test whether Unplugged – a ‘social influence’ school-based drug prevention programme of the kind developed in the USA – would prove effective in Europe. Across seven countries and 170 schools it recruited 7079 12–14-year-old pupils, the largest sample ever in a European drug education trial.

By design, at entry to the study none of the schools were implementing specific drug prevention interventions with strong packages targeted at the relevant school years, a situation which presumably persisted in most control schools. This should have given Unplugged a weak comparator against which what was intended to be a strong package could display its advantages in a study large enough to detect these. What emerged was a pattern of generally positive but modest and usually not statistically significant benefits relative to control schools. It seems probable that Unplugged was indeed preferable to doing nothing very much specifically to prevent substance use. However, if this was the case, the benefits were quite limited.

Read the full story at our partner site Drug and Alcohol Findings

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About Mike Ashton

Mike Ashton is the editor of Drug and Alcohol Findings, a collaborative project involving the National Addiction Centre, DrugScope and Alcohol Concern.

It produced the world’s only magazine devoted to evaluations of the effectiveness of alcohol and drug interventions and now offers a similar service from its web site Findings.

Previously he produced the first two Annual Reports on the State of the Drugs Problem in the European Union for the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction and Juice, a magazine for drug users in the UK. His background was 20 years at the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence, then the UK’s information service on the misuse of drugs, where he was became co-responsible for publications and founded the Druglink magazine. He edited the magazine for 10 years until leaving the Institute in 1995.

Until standing down in 2003 he also chaired (and remains a board member for) T3E UK, a charity especially concerned with race and drugs issues on which it provides training, research and consultancy.

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