Relative to controls, interventions succeeded at reducing incident STIs, increasing condom use, reducing or delaying penetrative sex, and increasing skills to negotiate safer sex and to acquire prophylactic protection. Initial risk reduction varied depending on sample and intervention characteristics but did not decay over time. Comprehensive behavioral interventions reduce risky sexual behavior and prevent transmission of STIs. Interventions are most successful when administered in larger doses. School-based drug abuse prevention programs for adolescents are an efficient way to deliver prevention services to young people before they become regular substance users or abusers. Contemporary prevention programs focus on social refusal skills training along with training in more generic "life skills" using cognitive, behavioral, and affective skills training techniques. This type of programming teaches principles of cognitive reframing, behavioral self-control, coping, and relaxation skills, along with how to apply these skills outside of the classroom in high risk situations. This presentation will review the concepts and empirical findings from the "Life Skills Training" prevention program, including short and long-term effects on related risk behaviors. Life Skills Training (LST) is a theoretically-driven evidence-based drug abuse prevention program for middle school students that emphasizes social resistance skills as well as more generic skills such as communication, assertiveness, decision-making, goal-setting, selfcontrol, and coping skills. Over 30 peer-reviewed articles with analyses of 18 separate cohorts of students have demonstrated that the LST program is effective with a variety of populations, producing behavioral effects on alcohol, tobacco, illicit drug use, as well as aggression and delinquency. Because LST targets etiologic factors common to both drug abuse and HIV risk and teaches skills that have a broad application, we examined the extent to which the intervention may reduce later HIV risk behavior. This presentation reviews findings demonstrating that the intervention reduced drug use and HIV risk behaviors in a sample of 2,042 predominantly white, suburban young adults who had received the preventive intervention in junior high school. Additional findings from a sample of 2,122 predominantly minority young adults will be presented demonstrating that several key skills measures (e.g., cognitive and behavioral self-control skills) that are targeted by the intervention predict various forms of substance use and HIV risk behavior in a similar fashion. These findings are presented in order to frame a discussion on the opportunities for developing competence-enhancement prevention programs to address both substance use and HIV risk behaviors, along with the challenges associated with addressing multiple risk behaviors in a single intervention. One goal of the presentation is to suggest that broad-based competence enhancement prevention programs may be an efficient and effective way to prevent a variety of negative outcomes during adolescence. A quasi-experimental design with three experimental conditions was carried out: program implemented by experts, program implemented by peers, and a waiting-list control group. Each participating center was randomly assigned to one condition. The intervention consisted of 5 sessions of one hour with the following components: information and cognitive restructuring, social skills training, problem solving training, and covert behavioral rehearsal. Three measures were conducted: pretest, posttest and 12-months follow-up. After the implementation of the program have shown improvement in the degree of knowledge and a significant attitudinal change. Comparisons between groups indicated that significant differences exist between the programs implemented by experts vs. the control group, and the program applied by peers. The effect size comparing the two types of applications was low. It shows how an intervention based on cognitive behavioral techniques succeeded in improving the level of knowledge about HIV / AIDS and change attitudes towards the disease, risk behavior and condom use. The program implemented by experts who performs better when implemented in pairs.