After the disappointment of the English Blueprint trial come results from a seven-nation drug education trial. EU-Dap probably registered some real successes, but these were few and small and may have been artefacts of the implementation and analysis of the study.
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.
Largest analysis to date offers practice insights in to motivational interviewing
December 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Better than treatment as usual but not than other specific therapies are the headlines from the most comprehensive synthesis of motivational interviewing studies to date. Along the way are insights in to the equivocal value of manuals and of feeding back assessment results to patients.
Young Swiss binge drinkers cut back after just 16 minutes alcohol advice
December 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Binge drinkers among young Swiss men being conscripted in to the army responded to around 16 minutes of alcohol advice by on average cutting their intake 20% more than recruits whose drinking was simply assessed, a rare demonstration of the impact of a brief intervention in an unselected population.
Parent-child intervention prevents heavy drinking in Dutch teens
November 22, 2011 By 2 Comments
In this Dutch study, promoting parental rule setting and classroom alcohol education together nearly halved the proportion of adolescents who went on to drink heavily. Rarely have such strong and sustained drinking prevention impacts been recorded from these types of interventions.
Problem drinking curbed by EU-funded drug education curriculum
September 10, 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. Among the successes were the reductions in problem drinking documented in this report.
Price rises cut alcohol-related death and morbidity
September 9, 2011 By 1 Comment
For what seems the first time, this analysis combined results from relevant studies to test whether low tax/price levels on alcohol result in poorer health and higher death rates. It found the expected relationships, but based on only the partial accounting of the harms and benefits of drinking found in most studies.
Ask heavy drinkers to make plans to drink less … and they do!
September 9, 2011 By 1 Comment
All this British study did was ask people out shopping, working or relaxing to complete a brief written survey about their drinking which ended with an injunction to make concrete plans to drink safely. Too simple to work?
Choosing abstinence versus other drinking goals makes little difference to outcomes
September 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Data from the largest alcohol treatment trial in Britain is used to address possibly the most contentious issue in the field – whether services should offer moderation as well as abstinence goals to dependent clients.
US experts recommend alcohol tax rises as an important public health measure
September 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
High on the UK pre-election policy agenda, alcohol tax rises have now been reviewed and accepted by a national US panel of experts as a major public health measure to curb excessive alcohol use and related harms.
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