Most of us have learned these skills as adults. Some of us have learned these things by observing the behavior of adults while we were growing up, but kids are increasingly spending more time with other kids. They're spending less time with adults, so you have a situation of the blind leading the blind. So we think it's important to teach these skills in a systematic way in a prevention program. By this combination of teaching general skills and problem-specific informational material related to drug abuse, we can cut drug abuse by 50 to 60 percent.
People have misunderstood the causes of drug abuse.
It's not a simple decision that people make to use drugs or not use drugs. All the traditional approaches to provide kids with information about the dangers of smoking, drinking, and using illicit drugs have largely failed. The problem is much broader, and you need a holistic approach, one that's designed to target several different risk factors. A lot of the life skills that we're teaching are really protective factors. They're a way of buttressing kids up and decreasing their motivations.