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Questions What is the San Diego County Underage Drinking Initiative? The San Diego County Underage Drinking Initiative is a multi-system, multi-agency effort to reduce the impact of underage drinking. Youth access to alcohol is a public health problem commanding attention throughout our society. Alcohol-related traffic crashes are the number one cause of death for young people. Youth are experimenting with alcohol at progressively earlier ages. Drinking is a factor in academic failure and school dropouts, in unwanted pregnancies and contracting sexually transmitted disease. Parents, educators and health and welfare workers see the consequences of underage drinking on a daily basis. The Underage Drinking Initiative attacks this problem by developing and implementing community-driven, research-based strategies that reflect the ethnic and cultural diversity of the population in urban and rural areas of San Diego County. What is Environmental Prevention? Environmental prevention is based on the fact that people's behavior, including their use of substances, is powerfully shaped by their environment, including the messages and images delivered by the mass media, the norms of their communities and other social groups, the availability of substances, and so forth. Therefore effective prevention requires making appropriate modifications to the physical, legal, economic, and sociocultural processes of the community at large that contribute to substance abuse and related problems (Holder, 1991). By targeting environmental factors, this approach to prevention differs from more traditional, individually based strategies, which tend to accept the environment and the risks it imposes as given and instead focus on enhancing individuals' abilities to resist its temptations. Prevention directed at the environment generally relies on public policies (e.g., laws, rules, regulations) and other community-level interventions both to limit access to substances and to alter the culture and contexts within which decisions about substance use are made. Because environmental prevention affects whole populations and creates change in the fundamental system-wide processes underlying substance abuse, it has the potential to bring about relatively quick, dramatic, and enduring reductions in substance abuse problems. The above passage is from the "Environmental Strategies To Prevent Alcohol Problems on College Campuses" by Deborah A. Fisher, Ph.D. of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, under a project awarded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Program Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. |