DRUG ABUSEcrime, which is closely related to substance-abuse
problems.
A community’s resources and social institu-
tions have a critical impact on drug use, but the
attitudes and behavior of peers and family may
have an even more direct influence. The affluence
of a community and the quality of its schools have
a substantial effect on the initiation of drug use,
but their impact is mediated by adolescents’ peer
relationships and their interactions with signifi-
cant adults in their lives. Thus, peers and parents
are perhaps the most vital elements of the commu-
nity context—directing or guiding youngsters’
needs and desires through the obstacles in their
environment. Some of the most important pro-
grams designed to address community substance
abuse focus on changing peer culture and address-
ing family attitudes and behavior.
Parents (or other adult ‘‘guides’’) arguably
have the greatest potential effect on how the young-
ster learns to negotiate the environment as it exists
(good or bad), and they can also affect the influ-
ence that the youngsters’ peers exert. The use of
drugs by parents significantly increases the likeli-
hood that their youngsters will also use drugs.
Although this might seem to be a clear example of
youngsters modeling the behavior of their par-
ents, the influence of parents’ own use of drugs is
probably more complicated. Some research sug-
gests that it is not merely that youngsters mimic
parents’ behavior, but instead such modeling in-
teracts with what they see in their peers. If both
peers and parents engage in substance use, there is
far greater likelihood that young people will be-
come regular users.
The influences of peers and parents may inter-
act in complex ways and each community is differ-
ent—its resources and institutions function differ-
ently. Communities can be directed to the key
levers, but there is no simple formula available to
determine which activities will be most important
for a particular community. What is clear, howev-
er, is that to understand and develop strategies
that reduce adolescent substance abuse, it is neces-
sary to consider the social context in which a child
lives. Only by identifying the resources available
within a community, the roles played by the social
institutions within that community, and the behav-
iors and values of the individuals (parents and
children) who live in that community, can the
interactions among the multiple forms and levels
of influence begin to be understood.RESEARCHSocial science research has played a critical role in
the identification of the substance-abuse problem,
it social consequences, and strategies to arrest the
use of illicit drugs. There is now a long-standing
tradition of surveys to identify drug use and atti-
tudes toward the use of mood-modifying substances
and their consequences. Surveys, such as the Na-
tional Household Survey on Drug Abuse (which
assesses the drug use of a random sample of U.S.
residents over twelve years old) and Monitoring
the Future (a school-based survey of junior and
senior high school students), have each been con-
ducted for more than two decades. Although there
is considerable discussion about the validity of
these surveys and how to ensure veridical data
(Beveridge, Kadushin, Saxe, et al. forthcoming),
there is no question that they have influenced
social policy.More recently, much of the focus of social
research has shifted to assessing strategies to pre-
vent drug use and to evaluate treatment programs.
Under the auspices of the National Institute on
Drug Abuse (a component of the National Insti-
tutes of Health), a variegated research program
includes both biological and sociopsychological
components. An emphasis of research is on assess-
ment of programs such as D.A.R.E., the Commu-
nity Partnership Program, and Fighting Back. De-
termining whether these programs achieve their
goals of preventing substance abuse is a particular-
ly difficult challenge. The programs are imple-
mented differently across communities and the
research design needs to separate the effects of
race, socioeconomic status, and other factors from
program implementation (Rindskopf and Saxe 1998).It is also the case that antidrug programs
develop loyal followings and their proponents de-
velop a stake in showing that their efforts are
successful. Thus, for example, there has been a
major debate about the D.A.R.E. program and
whether it is successful, with researchers claiming
that the evidence suggests it is not effective. In
other cases, such as the Community Partnership
Program and Fighting Back, the issue has been the