Summary - Department of Health and Ageing

Community prevention initiatives have been developed to target drug use directly.
Grounded in community improvement or community development, these initiatives focus
largely on changing adult behaviour and the structural issues that support and maintain
drug consumption. The Commonwealth Government initiative, Stronger Families and
Communities Strategy, launched in 2000, includes a focus on prevention and early
intervention, which is described as helping families early on to prevent later problems
such as domestic violence, youth suicide, homelessness and drug addiction. These broad
investments in community strengthening are also reflected in State programs that have a
similar focus. Although the contribution that community improvement initiatives make to
reducing drug-related harm is unknown, there are theoretical reasons to expect they
should enhance protective factors for positive child and youth development and more
generally improve wellbeing.
The developmental pathways framework, with its emphasis on reducing developmental
risk factors and enhancing protective factors, has the potential to improve coordination
between crime prevention, mental health promotion and drug use prevention efforts.
While broad-based prevention strategies vary in their direct or indirect relevance to the
prevention of drug-related harm, there are clear synergies between drug policy and
current efforts in other areas; for example, use of brief interventions and screening in
health, and harm reduction frameworks within injury and crime prevention policies.
The Protection and Risk Reduction Approach to prevention articulated in this document
has the potential to integrate these varying frameworks and provide a basis for strong
coordination between different prevention strategies. A closer link between research and
service delivery has the potential to strengthen prevention policy by identifying the
strategies and strategy combinations that are most effective in reducing early age drug use
and drug-related harm.