Mike Ashton writes:
ISSUE 3 of the Drug and Alcohol Findings magazine is now
available as free downloadable PDF versions
of the published content. Access the entire issue by clicking here.
Prevention specialists will find the article Education's uncertain saviour, our analysis of two decades of research on the Life Skills Training curriculum, studies which have done most to salvage drug education's prevention credentials. Indeed this work is impressive, but the deeper we dug, the shakier seemed the foundations. Later our concerns were confirmed in a painstaking analysis for the Scottish Executive.
Despite the concerns, there is much to learn from this important body of work. Also for prevention specialists, in issue 3 we discovered the Strengthening Families Program, later spotted by a Cochrane reviewer as the most promising "effective intervention over the longer-term for the primary prevention of alcohol misuse".
Our Nugget is titled Family skills programmes delay adolescent drinking but recruitment is a problem. From the EXTENDED TEXT... button in the PDF you can also view our later more extensive analysis of the programme.
Treatment specialists will find the careful work of Robert Fiorentine which confirms many counsellors' instincts - that how well they relate to their clients is an important (perhaps the most important) factor in their recovery. The title of the Nugget summed up the implications: Client-receptive treatment more important than treatment-receptive clients. Later we elaborated this theme in to the four-part Manners Matter series to be released as PDFs later in our web publishing programme.
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