Rural America Initiatives is the fiscal agent to the ASAP Coalition - Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention. Pennington and Shannon County are predominately white with a small population of Oglala Sioux. Shannon is ranked as the poorest county in the United States with 63 percent of the population living in poverty.
Teens rank drugs as the single most important problem facing people their age.
These perceptions are confirmed by findings from Monitoring the Future and Youth Risk Behavior studies. In addition to high usage rates of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana, there has been a growing epidemic of methamphetamine use. The coalition will focus on impacting youth, family, schools, businesses, and the media. The first goal is to address the factors that serve to increase the risk of substance abuse and factors that serve to minimize the risk of substance abuse. This will be done through an aggressive public awareness campaign directed at youth to show substance abuse is harmful.