Community efforts to prevent teen problems have lasting benefits

Want to prevent kids from using drugs and make it stick into young adulthood? Get the community involved and intervene before they’re teens, say researchers from the University of Washington.

A new, longitudinal study from the UW Social Development Research Group shows that young adults who grew up in communities that used a coordinated, science-based approach to prevention were more likely to have abstained from substance use, violence and other antisocial behaviors through age 21.

Researchers at the group, part of the UW School of Social Work, examined a decade’s worth of participant data across seven states as they evaluated the effectiveness of the Communities That Care (CTC) prevention…