Young adult substance abuse down significantly among PROSPER program participants
PROSPER, a community-based preventive intervention delivery system, is offered to young adolescents during middle school -- a pivotal period when exposure to and uptake of substances and other risky behavior begins. In this latest study, researchers found a 41 percent reduction in lifetime use of methamphetamine within a group of more than 1,900 19-year-olds, randomly selected from the full PROSPER sample of over 11,000 youth who joined the study in 6th grade. Study results, comparing youth in PROSPER communities vs. control communities, also showed reductions of lifetime cocaine use and marijuana use of more than 30 percent, and a reduction of prescription drug misuse of 20 percent. The investigators also found that at age 19, youth in PROSPER communities reported a significantly lower level of drug-related problems than youth in the control communities. The study was published in a recent issue of Psychological Medicine . "We already knew that the PROSPER program helpe...