Project Towards No Drug Abuse

Project Towards No Drug Abuse (Project TND) is a drug use prevention program for high school youth. The current version of the curriculum is designed to help students develop self-control and communication skills, acquire resources that help them resist drug use, improve decision-making strategies, and develop the motivation to not use drugs. It is packaged in 12, 40-minute interactive sessions to be taught by teachers or health educators. The TND curriculum was developed for high-risk students in continuation or alternative high schools. It has also been tested among traditional high school students.

The goal of this program is to decrease alcohol, tobacco, and drug use and to decrease violence and weapons-carrying among high school students.

At 2-year follow-up, students in Project TND schools were about half as likely to use tobacco when compared with students in control schools. Students in Project TND schools were about one-fifth as likely to use hard drugs relative to similar students in control schools.

At 1-year follow-up across three studies, students in Project TND schools who used alcohol prior to the intervention exhibited a reduction in alcohol use prevalence of between 7% and 12% (p < 0.05) when compared with similar students in control schools. At 1-year follow-up of a study using an expanded 12-session TND curriculum, students in Project TND schools exhibited a reduction in cigarette use of 27% (p < 0.05) when compared with students in control schools. At 2-year follow-up, students in Project TND schools were about half as likely to use tobacco (odds ratio = 0.50, p = 0.016) when compared with students in control schools.

At 1-year follow-up across three studies, students in Project TND curriculum schools exhibited a 25% reduction in hard drug-use prevalence rates on average (p < 0.05) relative to students in control schools. At 1-year follow-up of a study using an expanded 12-session TND curriculum, students in Project TND schools exhibited a reduction in marijuana use of 22% (p < 0.05) relative to students in control schools. At 2-year follow-up, students in Project TND schools were about one-fifth as likely to use hard drugs (odds ratio = 0.20, p = 0.02) and, among male nonusers at pretest, about one-tenth as likely to use marijuana (odds ratio = 0.12, p = 0.03), relative to similar students in control schools.

In two studies, male students who received the TND curriculum exhibited a relative reduction in weapons-carrying at 1-year follow-up of 19% to 21%. In one study, males in Project TND schools were about two-thirds as likely to report victimization at 1-year follow-up compared with males in control schools (odds ratio = 1.57, p = 0.03).