- Details
- Hits: 35
Childhoods marked by neglect, abuse or upheaval leave marks that can last well beyond the years they happened. A large new review of research confirms just how far those marks can reach. It links adverse childhood experiences to some of the most serious outcomes a young person can face, including death by suicide. Substance use sits close to the centre of this picture. One factor stands out as offering real protection: a stable and consistent family life.
What the Evidence Shows About Adverse Childhood Experiences
Published in JAMA Network Open, the review pulled together findings from 68 studies and 90 reports. It covered young people aged 24 and under, comparing those who died by suicide with peers who did not. Dr Geoffroy at McGill University in Canada led the analysis, which the authors describe as the most comprehensive of its kind to date.
The findings were stark. Young people who had experienced maltreatment faced roughly four times the odds of dying by suicide compared with those who had not. Youths removed from their family home carried similarly elevated risk. So did those who had been through the youth justice system, or whose parents had faced justice system involvement themselves. Lower educational attainment carried nearly three times the odds of suicide.
Taken together, the researchers describe childhood adversity as one half of a picture. The other half is psychiatric vulnerability, and the two are often closely intertwined.
How Adverse Childhood Experiences Fuel Substance Use
Among the clearest threads running through the research is substance use. Young people with a history of substance use faced more than seven times the odds of dying by suicide. Alcohol misuse carried around five times the odds. Drug use carried around six times the odds, figures the authors note were remarkably consistent across the studies reviewed.
Prior self-harm carried some of the highest odds of any single factor in the review, at fourteen times higher. Serious mental illness, including schizophrenia and mood disorders, followed close behind. Substance use rarely sits alone in a young person’s life. It tends to follow, or run alongside, the same childhood adversity that raises the risk of suicide in the first place. Early exposure to alcohol and drugs is a marker worth taking seriously, not a separate or later stage problem.
This is why prevention matters so much. Delaying and reducing early substance use, rather than managing it once established, remains one of the clearest levers available to protect young people. Waiting until use has become a fixed pattern narrows the options for changing course.
Family Stability as the Strongest Protection
Protective factors were studied far less often than risk factors. Where they were, one signal came through clearly. Young people living with both parents had close to half the odds of dying by suicide compared with those who did not. Having married parents carried a similar protective association.
The authors are careful to note that living arrangement and marital status are imperfect measures. What they most likely capture is something harder to quantify: consistency, presence and a sense of belonging. For prevention efforts, the message is nonetheless clear. Strengthening family bonds and supporting parents through difficulty is not a peripheral concern. It sits at the heart of protecting young people from some of the worst outcomes linked to adverse childhood experiences.
Turning the Evidence Into Prevention
Suicide remains among the leading causes of death for people aged 10 to 24 worldwide. The researchers behind this review are clear that reversing that trend means acting earlier. Reducing exposure to maltreatment and instability sits upstream of the crises this research documents. So does supporting families under strain, and treating early substance use as an urgent warning sign rather than a private matter.
Adverse childhood experiences do not determine a young person’s future on their own. But where they combine with early substance use and an absence of family stability, the risks compound. Recognising that pattern, and acting on it early, gives young people the best chance of a different outcome.
(Source: jamanetwork)
- Details
- Hits: 51
Drug checking services have quietly become one of the most accepted tools in how society now handles illegal drug use. A sample goes in. A result comes out. Somewhere in that exchange, a seller learns whether they cut the batch correctly, and a buyer learns whether tonight’s supply is roughly what it claims to be. It sounds sensible. It sounds careful. Nobody asks what all that careful information actually serves.
What Drug Checking Services Actually Tell You
These testing tools genuinely impress. Fourier transform infrared spectrometers scan a sample and match it against a library of known substances. British Columbia’s storefront testing programme now runs a paper spray mass spectrometer, a machine that can detect concentrations as fine as 0.04 per cent across 107 different drugs. Fentanyl test strips and benzodiazepine test strips fill in the gaps. Some services even accept samples by mail, so a person never has to walk through the door at all.
None of this is trivial science. But notice what it measures. It measures purity. It measures potency. It even measures contamination. It never set out to measure whether anyone should take the drug in the first place. Researchers in Victoria have reported that the market has stabilised its average opioid potency at around ten per cent. That market is not moving toward safety. It has simply learned to sustain itself more efficiently and hand out better instructions along the way.
The Seller Becomes an “Information Node”
One of the more revealing moves in recent harm reduction research is linguistic. Researchers no longer call them sellers. They become, in the words of one Canadian study, “main nodes of information” in the community. Researchers treat them as trusted intermediaries who might one day carry scientific knowledge back through informal networks. It is a generous framing. It is also a convenient one, and it is easy to see why drug checking services need it: the whole model depends on sellers walking through the door voluntarily.
A person who sells an illegal, often lethal substance for profit is still doing exactly that. It makes no difference how many test strips sit on the counter behind them. Recasting that role as a public health asset does something quiet to the moral picture. It shifts the seller from someone the community needs protection from into someone the system now works with. Ask a family that lost someone after a dealer added an unlisted sedative to the batch whether that reframing feels like progress.
A Safer Experience Is Not a Smaller Market
Here is the part that drug testing services rarely say out loud. Better information about a drug’s contents improves the experience of taking it. It does very little to reduce the demand for taking it at all. A buyer who trusts the result feels more confident walking away, not less. A seller who confirms the cut is right walks away with quality assurance for an illegal product.
A 2018 evaluation of one of Vancouver’s drug checking services found that just one per cent of clients at a supervised injection facility used the fentanyl test strip service, even though roughly eighty per cent of the drugs tested came back positive for fentanyl (Karamouzian et al., 2018). Wide contamination and low uptake sat side by side. That gap says something. Availability does not change behaviour anywhere near as much as its advocates assume.
This is not an argument that fewer people will die of poisoning tomorrow because a service caught a batch of unlisted nitazenes today. They probably will. The entire apparatus, however well meant, manages the supply of drug use. It never set out to shrink the appetite for it. Fewer surprises is not the same goal as fewer users.
“It Makes Them Feel Good” Is Not a Medical Explanation
Somewhere in the research that underpins this sector sits an unusually honest line. People use drugs, one researcher put it plainly, because it makes them feel good. That sentence deserves a straight reading, not a quick skim past it. In most of the cases this research describes, people are not medicating their own untreated trauma. Drugs are not the only tool available to them for that. This is recreational use. People choose it for the sensation it produces, and a scientific system now tests it and quietly approves the pursuit.
Call it what it is. A lab report does not turn hedonism into medicine. Treating that pursuit as neutral, no different to insulin dosing, changes what prevention now has to compete with. That is a system that has already made peace with the behaviour continuing indefinitely. None of this is a reason to scrap drug checking services outright, but it is a reason to stop pretending they sit outside the argument about right and wrong.
What the Evidence on Drug Checking Services Shows
None of this dismisses the data. Drug checking services do have a real evidence base behind them for reducing fatal overdoses, and the researchers behind them are not cynics chasing funding. Many come from lived experience and are trying, in good faith, to keep people alive inside a market that criminalisation has made chaotic and unpredictable. Safety and prevention are not always opposites, and a service that stops one preventable death has done something real.
The disagreement is not about whether these services save lives in the short term. It is about what harm reduction policy builds and normalises around them in the long term. It is about whether an approach that manages risk closes the door on an approach that reduces use altogether. We have raised a generation to believe that getting high safely is the ceiling of what prevention can offer. That generation deserves better. A higher ceiling was always possible.
(Source: WRD News)
- Details
- Hits: 48
New findings from brain science and education research are changing how communities view school based drug education. Researchers no longer treat it as one isolated lesson. Instead, they place it within life course science, alongside growing research on youth resilience. Two recent studies show why this shift matters. For example, a large cohort study in JAMA Network Open examined this question directly. It linked sustained access to a dedicated health course with lower rates of vaping and alcohol use. In addition, the same study found lower rates of binge drinking and marijuana use. Separately, University of Illinois researchers looked closely at adolescent beliefs. They found that one belief stands out above the rest. Specifically, a young person’s conviction that drug use is wrong predicts substance use more strongly than almost any other factor they measured. Together, these findings support what prevention educators have argued for years. Consistent, values informed drug education therefore forms a foundational part of building resilient young people. In short, it is not an optional add on.
School Based Drug Education and the Adolescent Brain
Understanding why school-based drug education matters starts with the brain itself. Neuroscience shows that white matter, the tissue connecting different brain regions, keeps developing well into a person’s twenties. In fact, some researchers now push that timeline into the early thirties. White matter relies on myelin, a fatty layer that speeds up neural signals. As a result, this layer supports memory, decision making, emotional regulation and impulse control. Because this system matures slowly, alcohol and other drugs pose particular risks during adolescence and young adulthood. Studies using diffusion tensor imaging consistently show reduced white matter integrity in people with substance use disorders. Notably, the extent of this change tracks with how early use began and how long it continued. It also tracks with how much a person used. Encouragingly, however, longer periods without use link to improved white matter integrity. This finding therefore explains why prevention and delayed uptake, rather than damage management alone, sit at the centre of best practice.
Viewed through this life course lens, school-based drug education does more than simply transmit facts. Instead, it protects a brain system that is still under construction. This system builds judgement, planning and emotional regulation, and young people rely on these capacities for the rest of their lives.
New Evidence Links Sustained School Based Drug Education to Lower Substance Use
Until recently, few large studies tested whether routine school coursework reduces adolescent substance use at a population level. A 2026 cohort study in JAMA Network Open closed that gap. Specifically, researchers analysed close to two million student survey responses. The data came from 915 California public high schools over seven years.
They found that sustained health course availability mattered most of all. Schools needed to offer the course for at least two consecutive years to see an effect. As a result, this sustained access linked to meaningfully lower prevalence across several substance use behaviours. Vaping, for instance, fell by an estimated 1.36 percentage points, while marijuana use fell by 1.22 percentage points. Alcohol use also dropped, by 1.11 percentage points, and binge drinking fell by 0.70 percentage points. Importantly, these differences held up even after adjustment for multiple testing.
Admittedly, these percentage point changes may look modest in isolation. However, school-based programmes reach entire student cohorts. Even small reductions, therefore, translate into meaningful numbers of young people avoiding early substance use altogether. The researchers also ruled out an alternative explanation. General declines in youth substance use elsewhere in the state did not explain the results. Instead, comparisons within the same schools over time produced the association. A dedicated health course that becomes a stable, ongoing part of the curriculum therefore functions differently to a single unit. In this way, it creates a durable structure for prevention messaging and reaches students consistently across cohorts and years. (No Brainer Curriculum)
Beliefs Matter Most in Adolescent Substance Use Prevention
Sustained coursework provides the structure for school-based drug education. Belief formation, however, may be its most powerful lever. University of Illinois researchers drew on more than 128,000 responses to the Illinois Youth Survey. They found that one belief stood out above all others. Specifically, a young person’s conviction that drug use is wrong carried real weight, roughly twice the predictive weight of other established risk and protective factors in the study.
Each incremental increase in how wrong a student rated drug use raised the odds of abstinence. For example, abstinence during the past year rose by 39 per cent among eighth graders. Similarly, it rose by 50 per cent among tenth graders and 53 per cent among twelfth graders.
The researchers grounded their work in cognitive dissonance theory. This theory holds that people seek consistency between their beliefs and their actions. Therefore, a clear conviction that using drugs is wrong tends to act as an internal brake on behaviour, even under peer pressure. Parental beliefs, meanwhile, reinforced this protective effect too. Peer acceptance of drug use, by contrast, increased risk.
These findings carry a clear implication for school based drug education programmes. Content that conveys risk information alone may not be enough. Instead, programmes also need to help students form and reinforce genuine convictions. Without this, prevention efforts may miss their single most influential lever.
Weaving Resilience Across the Life Course
Drug education does not operate apart from the wider project of building resilience. Recent research, for instance, examined youth wellbeing across 137 countries. It found something striking. Around 40 per cent of young people, in fact, report family members who have struggled with mental health or substance use. These adverse experiences often compound one another, feeding cycles that are difficult to break without deliberate support.
Resilience researchers increasingly describe this capacity differently now. Rather than a fixed trait, they see it as something people must build, much like weaving strands into a rope. Managing hardship, developing problem solving skills, persistence and a sense of hope all contribute. Each of these strands, however, depends on the same underlying brain systems that early substance use can compromise.
This is why prevention focused drug education fits naturally within a resilience building framework. A young person who never takes up substance use, in other words, keeps the full developmental runway needed to build these capacities undisturbed. Schools occupy a unique position here, since they are among the few institutions with sustained, repeated contact with young people. This contact spans the years when brain development and belief formation remain most malleable. Embedding drug education within that ongoing contact, rather than treating it as a standalone topic, therefore matters. Ultimately, this approach aligns prevention with the wider science of how resilience gets built across childhood and adolescence.
A Shared Responsibility for the Years That Matter Most
None of this evidence points to a single lesson, campaign or slogan shifting outcomes on its own. Instead, the research points towards something more sustained. Effective drug education, in other words, stays belief centred and developmentally informed. It reaches young people consistently across their school years, not just once.
Policymakers and educators, of course, face real choices about limited curriculum time. This growing evidence base, however, offers a clear direction. School based drug education deserves a stable, ongoing place in how communities prepare young people for the future. Understood within the broader science of life course development and resilience building, in short, it stands out. It ranks, ultimately, among the most evidence backed investments schools can make.
By Dalgarno Institute
References
- Details
- Hits: 131
Ask someone why they can’t put their phone down and they’ll probably laugh it off. Ask them why they can’t cut back on drinking, and the conversation gets heavier fast. Both answers start in the same place: a reward circuit in the brain that doesn’t much care whether the trigger is a text message or a drink. Understanding how addiction affects the brain explains a lot about why some habits grip harder and faster than others. The circuit is the same. The speed at which it fires is not.
What Happens in the Brain During Addiction
Dopamine is the chemical doing most of the work here. Something feels good, dopamine gets released, and the brain quietly files that moment away as worth repeating. Do it enough times and the circuit itself starts to change shape. Eventually the brain wants the trigger before it has even arrived. Plenty of people describe reaching for a habit as a kind of self-medication, something to blunt stress, boredom, or pain. The trouble is that the brain adapts to it, and what started as a choice stops feeling like one.
How Addiction Affects the Brain at Different Speeds
Not everything gets there at the same pace. Nicotine can hit the brain within seconds of a single inhale, which is part of why it produces such a sharp, immediate lift. Alcohol takes the scenic route, moving through the digestive system before it reaches the brain, though it still lands hard once it does. Stimulants barely pause on the way, flooding the reward circuit almost as fast as nicotine and just as intensely. That speed is exactly why they carry such a steep risk of dependence, sometimes after only a handful of uses. When a surge hits that quickly, the brain has almost no chance to talk itself down.
Why Substances Often Move Faster than Habits
Behaviours reach the same circuit, just by a longer road. A gambling win, a shopping haul, a flurry of likes on a post, all of it needs processing first. Only then does the brain decide it’s worth a reward. That extra step means the dopamine tends to arrive slower and land softer than it does with most substances. Frequency changes the equation, though. A phone that buzzes every few minutes works the same trick, and so does a slot machine paying out on no fixed schedule. Either one can train the brain to crave the next hit almost as hard as a drug would. Even so, each individual reward stays small.
The Same Circuit, a Different Risk Profile
Because substances tend to hit the circuit harder and faster, they also tend to build tolerance and withdrawal faster. Anyone who has skipped their morning coffee and spent the afternoon nursing a headache already knows what that feels like, even in miniature. Behavioural patterns can become just as consuming, given enough time, though they usually take longer to get there. That’s probably why they still get waved off as bad habits rather than treated as genuine risks. The numbers say otherwise. An estimated eight million Americans struggle with problem gambling. Roughly one in ten social media users show patterns that look a lot more like dependence than simple overuse.
Why This Matters for Prevention
A teenage brain is still under construction, particularly in the areas that handle judgement and impulse control. That makes early exposure to any fast acting trigger far riskier for a young person than for an adult. It’s also why prevention works better when it focuses on delaying first use rather than managing exposure after the fact. Willpower alone rarely carries the weight people expect it to. Families, schools, and communities all matter here. So do the industries designing products meant to hold attention, from slot machines to social media feeds to ad campaigns. Looking at product design and early intervention gets closer to how the brain science of addiction actually plays out. That’s a more honest picture than treating every case as a personal failing.
Noticing how fast a trigger reaches the brain is a useful place to start. So is watching how relentlessly it can reshape behaviour once it settles in. Anyone worried about a habit, their own or someone else’s, is better off understanding how addiction affects the brain before the pattern hardens. The earlier support comes in, the more room the brain still has to bend back the other way.
(Source: WRD News)
- Details
- Hits: 102
Australia ran the most successful anti-smoking campaign the world had ever seen. Not one of the most successful, the most successful. We reduced daily tobacco consumption from around 52 per cent of all Australians aged 16 and over in the late 1940s down to around 13 per cent just a few years ago. That is not a small achievement. That is decades of disciplined, consistent, evidence-based public health work paying off in one of the most sustained behaviour change campaigns any country has ever managed.
And then we watched it get systematically undermined.
A Campaign That Was Actually Working
The Quit campaign succeeded because it kept the message simple and it never wavered. Don’t start. If you started, quit completely. No substitutes – No safer alternatives – No managed use – Just stop. That sustained clarity in and from all major sectors, health, policy, government, media and education, cut through for decades and the numbers proved it.
The data from that period showed around 100,000 Australians quitting annually. Real people walking away from a real addiction and that is the campaign working exactly as intended. The problem was that roughly the same number from the emerging youth demographic were replacing those who quit each year. That should have been the alarm bell. Instead, addiction for profit activists saw it as an opening and they moved quickly to exploit it.
Cannabis: The First Substitution
That youth replacement trend did not emerge in isolation, it coincided directly with the steady liberalisation of cannabis use across Australia. Along with the faux medicinal prefix conveniently attached to it, cannabis was reframed in the public mind as the more acceptable, less harmful option to tobacco. Genuine clinical need had very little to do with how that label landed in popular culture. It was a perception shift, and it was effective.
Suddenly the choice for young Australians was not between using and not using. It was between products, with one framed as medicine and the other as poison, that is a profound and deliberate shift. Harm reduction did not discourage substance use here, it redirected it toward a different product while keeping the behaviour intact and unsurprisingly, redirected use still builds dependency.
Dependency drives demand – that pattern is not complicated and it is not accidental.
Vaping: Same Trick, New Vehicle
If cannabis cracked the prevention model, vaping came along and really went to work on it. Pro-drug activists hijacked harm reduction again, this time pushing e-cigarettes hard as the clean, modern alternative to tobacco. A legitimate quitting tool, they said. A safer delivery mechanism that declared – compassionate harm reduction in action was the ad nauseum spin.
Except it did not stop people inhaling health-destroying toxins, it just changed the device.
The fundamental behaviour, drawing toxic substances into your lungs, remained completely intact. And then, surprise surprise, we discovered that this new delivery vehicle carried its own serious harms; Respiratory damage, cardiovascular risk, lung injuries that were not supposed to exist in a product sold as the safe alternative. Who could possibly have seen that coming!
What vaping actually delivered, away from the carefully controlled conditions of clinical trials, was a brand new generation of nicotine users who had never smoked a cigarette in their lives – teenagers and young adults. Drawn in by flavours, by slick marketing, by a product deliberately designed to feel nothing like smoking while delivering exactly the same addiction. These were not smokers switching to a safer product, these were new users being recruited into nicotine dependency through a door that harm reduction activists propped wide open. Dependency followed – demand followed dependency, and that demand needed somewhere to go.
A Generation Sold a Crock
So here we are, a generation sold a lie on multiple fronts. Cannabis was medicine. Vaping was quitting. Every step dressed up as harm reduction, every step quietly encouraging use rather than ending it, every step adding to the pool of dependent users while presenting itself as a public health solution, and now it has all landed back on the cigarette.
That is the real backdrop to Australia’s exploding illicit tobacco trade. Illicit product now accounts for somewhere between a third and half of all tobacco sold nationally. Excise losses run between seven and twelve billion dollars annually. A decade ago that number sat under one billion. The trajectory is not subtle. Organised crime moved into that space fast and they brought arson, shootings and systematic retailer intimidation with them. This is not a grey market, this is a serious criminal enterprise operating at scale, and it is operating into a demand base that bad harm reduction policy helped build and maintain.
The Quit Campaign Did Not Fail
Now the message gaining traction in the public square is that the War on Tobacco failed, that the illicit market proves it. That prevention doesn’t work and we need a new approach. Same old mantra, new spin, same people pushing it.
Let us be crystal clear, the Quit campaign did not fail – it worked and it can still work. What failed was harm reduction policy hijacked by addiction-for-profit operators who are very good at exactly one thing – finding ways to build an inescapable customer base. The playbook is consistent; introduce a substitute, market it as safer, recruit new users under the cover of helping existing ones. Normalise the behaviour, sustain the dependency and collect the revenue.
They line their pockets and they throw hapless thousands into an already collapsing health system to manage the ever-increasing damage their products cause. And then they point at the chaos they helped create and call it proof that prevention doesn’t work. It is breathtaking in its cynicism and it has been running for a long time.
The short- and long-term harms of this game are almost inestimable. And the first step toward addressing them honestly is calling it exactly what it is.
Dalgarno Institute (Source: WRD News)
- Synthetic Drugs Crisis: The Prevention Questions Nobody Asked
- Building Resilient and Inclusive Responses to Substance Use and Addiction WORLD FORUM 2026 WFAD CAPACITY TRAINING SERIES
- Adolescent Substance Use Linked to Nearly Double the Risk of Psychological Distress, Study Finds
- National Tragedy Triggers Immediate Tobacco and Cannabis Cravings, New Research Finds