A Universal Intervention for the Prevention of Substance Abuse: Preparing for the Drug-Free Years

Until relatively recently, one of the major impediments to effective preventive interventions was the absence of a framework for empirically based prevention. Prevention efforts often failed because they were based on models of adolescent problem behaviors, including substance abuse, which were inconsistent with the empirical evidence. However, tremendous strides have been made in identifying some of the potential causes of adolescent problem behaviors. Factors that are longitudinally related to drug use or abstention have been articulated in typologies of risk and protective factors (e.g., Hawkins et al. 1992, 1995; Institute of Medicine 1994; Loeber et al. 1991; Newcomb and Felix-Ortiz 1992; Newcomb et al. 1987; Werner and Smith 1992). The number of epidemiological and etiological studies providing the basis for these typologies has helped to usher in a new era of riskand protective-focused prevention. Interventions at any level, from individual through community, can now be carefully designed to address known predictors of substance use identified in the empirical literature.