DRUG USE PREVENTION PROGRAMMING IN CONTINUATION SCHOOLS

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This competing continuation grant will permit following a high risk population (continuation high school youth) into young adulthood. The average age of these subjects at the end of the first ("parent") project is 18.5 years. Their average age at the end of the four-year renewal will be 22.5 years. Three central aims will be completed over this four-year time period. First, we will examine changes in drug use behavior among our continuation high school cohort from the parent grant, including changes in self-reported lifetime and current use (frequency of use in the last 30 days) of cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and hard drugs. Further, we will examine the longitudinal relations of drug use with demographic, social milieu, and perceived interpersonal and intrapersonal variables, to discern the relative importance of these variables as predictors of problem use in young adulthood among this high risk cohort. In addition, we will examine the development of young adult substance abuse and dependence, as measured through self-reports; and we will examine other consequences of drug use in young adulthood, including school and job satisfaction, need of public aid, marital and parental status, living with substance abusers, safe driving and drug use, accidental injuries or arrests and drug use, and gang membership, depression, violence and drug use. Second, in Year 1 of the renewal, we will examine the efficacy and effectiveness of more thorough drug abuse prevention programming (12 lessons), at continuation high schools, on cigarette, alcohol, marijuana, and hard drug use. A health educator-delivered program will be compared to a self-instruction program (usually delivered in continuation high schools; health educator assisted) versus a standard care condition, in a three-condition randomized design (n- 18 schools), with a three-year follow up that includes booster programming. Also, beginning Year 2 of the renewal, a memory accessibility model will be utilized in a six-group design to assess promise of a novel type of booster with this new cohort. Both a design to assess immediate effects of this booster programming on memory accessibility, and utilization of a design to assess longer- term effects (over two additional years), will implemented.