Industry Update | The DEA’s Guide to ‘Prevention with Purpose’
This year, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s Division of Campus Drug Prevention updated the Prevention with Purpose: Planning Guide for Preventing Drug Misuse Among College Students.
This updated, 168-page guide emphasizes cultural responsiveness by collegiates and encourages AOD leaders to consider how the attitudes of various communities on campus impact the student responsiveness to prevention efforts. The aim is to provide a framework for university administrators to systematically measure the scope of drug misuse issues on each campus and enact prevention efforts.
For important context, the DEA’s guide explains how the college environment can “make it tempting to see drug experimentation or even regular drug use as exploratory.” Students report that a college campus is a rich environment for drug experimentation because of the “low perceived risk of harm, ease of drug availability, lack of parental influence, and normalization of drug use among peers.”
The DEA highlights the impact college students have historically had on socially normalizing recreational drug use. Particularly students with more privileged characteristics, who are more likely to use alcohol, marijuana, and other substances than their peers. Students of historically marginalized backgrounds tend to increase their use when socializing in a more privileged environment. Due to varying socioeconomic, gender, racial, and peer influences within a campus ecosystem, it is crucial that the language for educating about substance use is inclusive of each community.
Too many students are unaware of the difference between the consequences of substance misuse, like overdose or alcohol poisoning, and the behaviors of substance misuse, like truancy or underage drinking. Traditional prevention efforts singularly highlight the consequences of substance misuse, and leave students to learn through experience how the behaviors of substance misuse may be negatively impacting them. In analyzing campus prevention efforts, AOD programmers should ensure their students feel confident in knowing the consequences, behaviors and effects of substance misuse.
The DEA recommends that each college or university determine their capacity for integrating necessary prevention resources by measuring the strength of available resources and the leadership potential of AOD educators for students to effectively learn about behaviors of substance use.
Overdose is now the leading cause of death for college-aged Americans per the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). This is a pivotal time to implement comprehensive drug misuse prevention education across all college campuses.
To implement a successful Drug Misuse Prevention Program at the institutional level:
Prioritize risk and protective factors
Select appropriate interventions to address priority factors
Determine how many interventions can be implemented with the resources available
Build a strategic plan
To initiate a strategic plan, many universities can and do reach out to their local Prevention Technology Transfer Centers (PTTCs) as a free resource to help determine where gaps may be hiding in their current substance use education. PTTCs also provide support in accessing grant funding focused on substance misuse prevention efforts that best align with each university’s culture. This grant funding can be applied to programs like DopaGE that provide new approaches to resolving the myriad of substance use issues that occur on campuses.
In building out a strategic plan, the DEA recommends weighing what issues are most pertinent on campus against the stringency of the current system(s), thereby achieving results with measurable change in student attitude toward drug experimentation. The balance of fidelity and adaptation is critical to maintain core components of the institution’s substance use education program while iterating on what is offered to address unique needs of a student community.
Following the strategic plan’s implementation, universities should evaluate the overall success of the prevention program through students' attitudes towards substance use, misuse and risk. These metrics provide greater clarity than the traditional focus on how often a student is participating in substance use. While evaluating potential strategies, it is important to consider how the methods implemented for substance use prevention can withstand potential disruptions by maintaining the ability to pivot easily - while remaining accessible to a large number of students.
DopaGE remodels the student perception that college is a prime time for drug experimentation by educating new students on a combination of the behaviors of substance misuse and the problems of substance misuse surrounding commonly misused substances. The virtual Overdose Prevention Portal educates students across diverse communities on campus and offers universities flexibility when facing a range of common disruptors to campus programs.
Click here to dive deeper into how DopaGE fulfills DEA drug misuse prevention recommendations with a member of our team.