The good news is in. The University of Michigan’s annual "Monitoring the Future Study" reports that cigarette smoking, illegal drug use, and alcohol abuse among eighth, tenth, and twelfth graders declined slightly in 1998, after years of steady increase. Results of this national study suggest prevention strategies are working. But which ones?

Finding the answer is the impetus for the ImpacTeen Program, a partnership of nationally recognized substance abuse experts, directed by Frank J. Chaloupka, PhD, professor of economics at the UIC College of Business Administration. The program is housed in UIC SPH’s Health Research and Policy Centers.

"Prevention strategies directed at young people have included limiting access to alcohol and cigarettes, explicitly and implicitly increasing the price and other costs of using legal and illicit drugs, school-based prevention programs, and media campaigns," says Chaloupka. "Surprisingly, very little is known about the effectiveness of these efforts in reducing youth substance use. Determining what works and does not work is the purpose of ImpacTeen."

The five-year program has been funded with a $13.4 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the single largest grant ever given to a UIC research project by a private foundation. Currently in its first year, ImpacTeen is collecting data on trends, markets, policies, legislation, enforcement, treatment, educational programs, advertising, and other environmental factors from fifty states and the District of Columbia. The data will be merged with nationally representative surveys of youth to evaluate the relative effectiveness of specific prevention programs and policies in reducing youth substance use and abuse.

"This is a creative and important study, headed by leading policy and information researchers," says C. Tracy Orleans, PhD, senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "ImpacTeen is going to provide heretofore unavailable information—credible information—about the links between environmental influences and substance abuse."

Measuring and evaluating the impact of individual prevention efforts will be crucial to ensuring continuation of the downward trend of use and abuse. Ultimately, the data and findings from the ImpacTeen Program will be available to government and other agencies for use in formulating effective prevention programming.

Drawing on the resources of substance abuse experts with specialties in economics, etiology, epidemiology, law, political science, public policy, psychology, and sociology, ImpacTeen represents a cooperative collaboration among institutions, including UIC, the University of Minnesota, the University of Delaware, and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York.

Members of the research team will identify and track the impact of legislation, policies, and programs addressing substance use and abuse. These initiatives will be evaluated for their effectiveness in reducing mortality, morbidity, and psychosocial problems, as well as for their effectiveness in reducing alcohol-related causes of mortality, such as traffic crashes, homicide, suicide, recreational injuries, and other health problems.

Community-level data collection on alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug policies and programs will be conducted by UIC researchers, using a nationally representative sample of about 1,000 communities. Ultimately, they will be linking this new data to school-based surveys, such as the "Monitoring the Future Study" at the University of Michigan.

ImpacTeen represents UIC’s continued leadership in youth substance abuse research and prevention. The Health Research and Policy Centers (HRPCs) have long been a model of partnerships that bring together frontline community and public health agencies with the resources of academic institutions.

Among HRPCs’ initiatives has been the Aban Aya Youth Project, an experimental classroom and community program focusing on violence and drug abuse prevention and the reduction of unsafe sex behavior. Drawing on a variety of disciplines in the HRPCs, a team of experts designs and initiates a series of school- and community-based interventions for children in grades five through eight. One set of risk interventions is implemented in the classroom. The second set enhances the classroom work by involving parents, the school community, and the neighborhood.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, Aban Aya is directed by Brian R. Flay, DPhil, professor of community health sciences and psychology in UIC’s School of Public Health and Department of Psychology, director of the HRPCs, and co-director of ImpacTeen.

"This is a pioneer program," says Flay. "We started with kids in grade five, who are now in grade nine. We are in the process of analyzing our impact as a whole. However, initial results show that we have reduced the usual increase in violence over this period by one-third, compared to the control group."

Such early and successful interventions highlight the potential impact of these programs on public health, according to Chaloupka. "Statistics suggest that if people can be deterred from using or abusing alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs when they are between the ages of twelve and eighteen, it is unlikely that they will use or abuse these substances as adults."

Contributed by Marian Lawler