Summary - Department of Health and Ageing

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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.
2 Broad-based interventions do not lend themselves to the standard ratings, thus strategies are summarised in terms of their applicability to drug use and harm.
Page 3 and 4: © Commonwealth of Australia 2004 I
Page 5 and 6: © Commonwealth of Australia 2004 I
Page 8 and 9: Drugs, both licit and illicit, caus
Page 10 and 11: The prevention paradox captures the
Page 12 and 13: The effectiveness of each intervent
Page 14 and 15: Drug use—both licit and illicit
Page 16 and 17: Use of performance and image enhanc
Page 18 and 19: Drug use problems and mental illnes
Page 20 and 21: Rates of drug use in these populati
Page 22 and 23: Indigenous Australians provide the
Page 24 and 25: Parents continue to be an important
Page 26 and 27: Effective intervention to prevent d
Page 28 and 29: There is increasing evidence that i
Page 30 and 31: Drug education attempts to reduce d
Page 32 and 33: Some communities have developed coo
Page 34 and 35: A number of evaluations show promis
Page 36 and 37: Prevention strategies across a numb
Page 40 and 41: Reduction of the demand for drugs a
Page 42 and 43: There is also growing interest in c
Page 44 and 45: Finally, there is a need to investi
Page 46 and 47: Alcohol taxation: changes in the pr
Page 48 and 49: severe injuries including gangrene.
Page 50 and 51: Law enforcement plays an important
Page 52 and 53: Controlling drug supply from within
Page 54 and 55: There is a significant link between
Page 56 and 57: Drug detection and deterrence progr
Page 58 and 59: A number of strategies are designed
Page 60 and 61: venues but it is not clear whether
Page 62 and 63: This final chapter presents recomme
Page 64 and 65: Table 2 sets out proposed objective

Summary - Department of Health and Ageing

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