Drug Prevention Efforts in American Schools Essay Example

Are schools responsible for the sharp increase of drug abuse in teens? A study (United Educators, 2014) analyzed over 50 claims revolving around AOD (alcohol and other drugs), including overdoses, hospitalizations, and criminal charges for driving under the influence.  The UE had also gotten insight on student suicides, accidental deaths, injuries, and sexual misconduct. Many of the students' families had stated the school's errors, these errors were unfair discipline or investigation, negligent or inadequate supervision, and unlawful distribution by educators. The UE had come to the conclusion that schools do not do enough to prevent drug and alcohol abuse. While many schools are making efforts to fix the drug and alcohol abuse, although many schools have claimed the issue is under control, insufficient attention has actually been given to the real abuse problem. Although some studies have indicated that schools do tend to do enough to prevent drug usage, the majority of research suggests schools do not prevent drug abuse. 

The increased drug abuse over the past century cannot fully be blamed on educators or the education system. Research has shown that most of this drug abuse has taken place on school grounds. Another page of research (Turnbridge, no listed date) shows that 50% of teens had already tried an illicit drug by senior year. Turnbridge explains how the schools cannot be blamed fully. They explain how as a parent you should be teaching your children to not be pressured into trying drugs in the first place, but many rebel from their parents. Also stated in this article, a survey was put out and it determined that about 60% of teens attend ‘drug infected’ schools. In the early 1990’s most schools were a part of a popular drug abuse prevention organization, ‘D.A.R.E’. However this program lost funding in 1998, and ever since then, you probably haven’t seen many drug prevention organizations in compliance with your own school. However, another section of research has been conducted on why many of these drug prevention organizations had lost funding, (Harvard University, 2004) has determined that many of these programs didn’t work, D.A.R.E was a program about 70%-80% of schools used in the US. Harvard had brought this evidence to many schools to prove that many of these organizations didn’t work. And most of these schools had admitted that they didn’t believe the program would’ve prevented anything anyway. Yet again, we can’t blame this abuse fully on the schools, this can be partially blamed on the students' home life, or parents. Is there any real effective way to prevent drug abuse in teens? We can suspect that after D.A.R.E lost funding, that schools didn’t pair with any other organizations because they knew that these organizations weren’t effective. This can cause us to question, what is a way that we as a society can prevent drug abuse? 

Should schools have more counselors, or become involved with more organizations like D.A.R.E again? Many teens believe that they should have more trusted adults to be able to talk to, because sometimes their adults aren’t trusted enough. And schools have made some steps to getting back involved with drug free organizations. Looping back around to the D.A.R.E scandal, an academic source (Matthew J. Zagumny, Michael K. Thompson, 2001) did research in rural Tennessee.