Preventing Adolescent Substance Abuse

Abstract
Substance abuse is extremely prevalent among adolescents. School counselors have an opportunity to implement prevention and intervention strategies to help assist adolescents with his or her usage and abuse. This literature review defines the importance of the counselor’s role in adolescent substance abuse. The literature review also explores prevention techniques that school counselors can implement. In addition to prevention methods, the literature review also explores the intervention strategies that school counselors can use to support adolescents with substance abuse. Finally, this literature review explores the training school counselors receive to help support adolescents with substance abuse. There is an identifiable gap in research for the continued prevention, intervention, and training methods for school counselors to address adolescent substance abuse. Keywords: school counselors, adolescent, substance abuse, prevention, intervention
Therefore, the United States government is pushing schools to create anti-drug campaigns and other evidence-based programs that create a safe school environment (Jowers, Bradshaw, & Gately, 2007). In creating a safe school environment, policy makers hope to reduce the incident rate of substance abuse among adolescents. An important evidence-based prevention program is the Reconnecting Youth drug prevention program. This program identifies and targets at-risk youth and implements a semester long class. In the class, the facilitator, typically the counselor, teaches lessons focused on life skills that include coping skills and communication skills. The continued implementation of the program is both intensive and costly, which causes schools to eventually drop the program (Thaker et al.,