TESTING A METHOD FOR INCREASING RURAL PREVENTION EFFORTS

Colorado State University-Fort Collins, Fort Collins CO

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION: (Applicant?s Abstract) This project is designed to determine whether a state-wide intervention can lead to increases in prevention efforts in rural communities in that state and whether those prevention efforts lead to reductions in methamphetamine use and the use of other drugs. Wyoming is suffering from a serious epidemic of methamphetamine use among rural adolescents. The problem is not limited to methamphetamines, since 90% of those who used methamphetamine in the last month also used marijuana and at least one drug other than methamphetamine during that month. A state-wide prevention initiative will mobilize rural communities to develop and implement drug abuse prevention policies and programs. In each rural community in Wyoming a prevention team will be formed. That team will be trained in the community readiness model and will be helped to use that model to move their community to implement, maintain and evaluate local prevention efforts. The training model is that recommended and described in NIDA publication 97-4112. Local teams will be monitored monthly by phone and quarterly by personal interviews, and will be provided with encouragement, support, information on programs and policies, and retraining over a four year period. These communities will be compared with a set of communities from surrounding states matched with each of the Wyoming communities for population, rurality, and methamphetamine use. The first goal is to determine whether this initiative leads to changes in community policies and to implementation of rural prevention programs. Baseline key informant interviews in the experimental and comparison communities are now in progress to determine readiness for prevention (including policies and prevention programs now in place, leadership, local knowledge and community support). These key informant interviews will be repeated after three years and after five years, obtaining complete data on the changes in policies and programs. The second task is to determine whether the policies and prevention programs instituted by the local teams have led to changes in drug use. Baseline adolescent drug use data have been collected from the experimental group of rural Wyoming communities and from all of the matched comparison communities. Students in all communities will be resurveyed three years after the intervention starts and five years after the intervention starts.