School-based drug abuse prevention with inner-city minority youth

This study tested the effectiveness of a drug abuse prevention intervention with a predominantly minority sample of seventh-grade students (N = 721) in 7 urban schools in New York City. The drug abuse prevention curriculum teaches social resistance skills within the context of a broader intervention promoting general personal and social competence and implemented by regular class-room teachers. Results indicated that this approach was effective on several behavioral measures of current drug use including measures of polydrug use and on intention measures relevant to future drug use. Furthermore, there was some evidence for factors presumed to mediate the effects of this type of intervention (normative expectations and refusal skills). The significance of these findings is that they provide further support for the generalizability to a minority inner-city adolescent population of an approach previously found to be effective with white middle-class adolescent populations. In addition, this is the first time that effects have been shown with inner-city minority youth for the use of multiple drugs.