Modest Gain Found With School Drug Programs
Although the best school-based drug prevention programs are worth the cost, they produce only modest results and are hardly a “silver bullet” in the government’s war on drugs, a new Rand study concludes.
The study, which focused on cocaine use, estimates that the best of the anti-drug prevention efforts will curtail a student’s use of the substance by an average of 8% over his or her lifetime--a result that, dollar for dollar, compares favorably with government efforts to shrink demand by destroying coca leaves overseas or by patrolling the border.
But the 194-page report released Tuesday cautions against expecting too much from prevention programs, the full effects of which, it says, can take up to 40 years to kick in.
“The bad news for prevention enthusiasts is that prevention does not appear to be the hoped-for silver bullet,” the study concludes. “It is not likely that with current technology, prevention can play a decisive role in eradicating our current drug problem.”
The report, titled “An Ounce of Prevention, a Pound of Uncertainty,” comes as government officials at all levels increasingly emphasize school-based prevention programs as part of the $40-billion-a-year war on drugs.
It’s been an uphill battle. After hitting a trough in the early 1990s, drug use among students is rising, federal figures show. The number of 12th-graders using cocaine has nearly doubled, from 1.3% in 1992 to 2.4% in 1998.
The federal government has tried to stem the tide by funding a plethora of anti-drug education programs in schools, but recent scientific research shows that many aren’t effective, the Rand study says.
However, it focuses on two programs roundly considered to work--Project ALERT and Life Skills--both of which teach seventh- through ninth-graders the social skills to resist peer pressure.
The Rand study, which involved 7,600 students, was based on evaluations of the programs in 1993 and 1995. These evaluations involved 86 schools, including 30 in California and Oregon.
The programs have reduced the use of marijuana, says the Rand study, which inferred an impact as well on cocaine consumption. Cocaine use typically starts after high school and leads to relatively more deaths, arrests and lost worker time than other drugs.
The study also attempts to establish, for the first time, a cost-benefit ratio that compares the prevention programs with other government enforcement efforts to curtail cocaine use. The results:
* Students who go through the prevention programs cut their lifetime use of cocaine by 2.9% to 13.6%, with the midpoint being 7.6%.
* The benefits outweigh the costs. Every dollar spent on prevention yields an estimated $2.40 savings in social costs, such as crime, lost workplace hours or deaths.
* Prevention isn’t nearly as cost-effective as treating drug abusers, but it has a better payoff than border patrols or eradicating coca leaves overseas.
* The prevention programs could be implemented in all middle schools for $550 million, easily affordable for the federal government. But it would take a long time to see results: six years to show a 1% drop in the number of cocaine users, and 40 years for a 7.5% decrease.
As such, prevention has a “modest impact” and should be considered a form of “cheap insurance” for the next drug epidemic, whenever that may be, said Jonathan P. Caulkins, lead researcher on the study and professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
“It’s too late for prevention by itself to be enough to address the current epidemic,” he said Tuesday. “The horse is out of the barn.”
Caulkins cautioned that the study, which is driven by economic models and several key assumptions, demonstrates the uncertainty involved in pinning down the effects of prevention programs.
Yet he added that one of the surprising findings was that prevention programs have a large “spillover” effect. “If you prevent one person [from using cocaine], you can short-circuit a chain reaction of initiation,” he said.
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Fruits of Drug Prevention Programs
A Rand Corp. study released Tuesday tries for the first time to compare the cost-
effectiveness of school-based prevention programs to that of more traditional forms of drug enforcement.
Americans consume 250,000 to 300,000 kilograms of cocaine each year. Here is how much cocaine use drops, on average, for every $1 million invested in the following government programs:
Drug treatment programs: 104 kg
Federal law enforcement: 63 kg
Longer federal prison sentences: 36 kg
Local law enforcement efforts: 28 kg
Prevention programs: 26 kg
Interdiction, including border patrol: 20 kg
Eradicating coca plants in other countries: 10 kg
*
Source: Rand Corp. study “An Ounce of Prevention, a Pound of Uncertainty”
