The Interplay of Social, Normative, and Legal Marijuana Environments and Marijuana and ATOD Use From Late Childhood to Young Adulthood

Preventing alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use; delinquency; violence; and health-risking sexual behavior among adolescents is a national priority. While advances in prevention science over the past two decades have produced a growing list of tested and effective programs and policies for preventing these behaviors, widespread dissemination and high-quality implementation of these effective programs and policies in communities has not been achieved. The development and testing of approaches for translating prevention research findings into effective community prevention service systems with long-term impact is important to achieving reductions in the prevalence of adolescent health and behavior problems that are sustained into adulthood.

The Community Youth Development Study (CYDS) is a community-randomized trial of the effects of Communities That Care (CTC) on community prevention systems and adolescent risk, protection, and behavioral health outcomes. The current continuation study is evaluating the long-term effects of CTC on a panel of 4,407 young adults at ages 21 and 23 who have been surveyed regularly since the trial started when they were in grade 5.

CTC is a prevention planning and capacity building system for improving behavioral health problems among youth community-wide. CTC guides communities to implement with fidelity and monitor the results of effective prevention programs that address community-specific elevated risk factors and depressed protective factors and reduce problem behavior. The CTC system is hypothesized first to produce improvements in key characteristics of community prevention service systems, which, in turn, reduce community levels of risk, increase protective factors, and lower rates of youth problem behaviors.

The CYDS communities were matched in pairs within state, on population size, racial and ethnic diversity, economic indicators, and crime rates. One community from each matched pair was assigned randomly by a coin toss to either the intervention or control condition. Starting in 2003, intervention communities received training, technical assistance, and materials and funding needed to install the CTC prevention system in years 2-5 (2004-2008), hire a community coordinator, and implement 2-5 tested preventive interventions. Selected interventions addressed local prevention priorities established by communities after reviewing local epidemiological data on youth risk factors, protective factors and problem behaviors. Control communities received no training or technical assistance from the study. Technical assistance and study-provided funding to intervention communities ended after 5 years.

The initial CYDS trial (2003-2008) evaluated the efficacy of CTC in reducing levels of risk, increasing levels of protection, and reducing levels of drug use and other problem behaviors in adolescents from Grades 5 through 9. It also tested the effects of CTC on prevention service system transformation (e.g., increases in a science-based approach to prevention, collaboration among prevention service organizations, support for prevention, community norms against drug use and delinquency, and use of the Social Development Strategy to guide interactions with youth) as reported by key community leaders and members of CTC coalitions.