Even the most gungho warrior against drugs understands the fight will be
won or lost on the home front. Inside every home, parents either will
create an atmosphere against drug abuse, or the reverse.

Inside every school, the principal and teachers either will teach
drugresistance skills to children and help them succeed academically, or
not. In every community, residents either will establish an antidrug
attitude, or fail to do so.

Those statements may seem simple and direct, but they signify the
formidable complications of preventing drug abuse. To Alan I. Leshner,
director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, it's ``the most complex
problem facing humanity.''

To prevent drug abuse, to stop it before it starts, is obviously the best
course. Better that than the agony of addiction and the frustration and
expense of treatment. Better prevention to reduce the number of Americans
seeking drugs than the existing huge demand that makes this nation a
marketer's delight for drug criminals.

But how? How can individual Americans stand up against the tidal wave of
cocaine, heroin and marijuana that washes across our shores and harms our
children?

It seems such an overwhelming task. Besides, drug prevention is not as
dramatic or easily understood as the excitement of law enforcement agents
swooping down on smugglers, seizing their illegal narcotics and charging
them with crimes.

Prevention may be hard, grinding work, but it's far from impossible.
Research over the past two decades points the way toward practical steps
that can be effective, especially if they're taken within an overall
antidrug norm in a community and if the messages to children are
consistent and persistent.

The work of prevention must be done in local communities, as Zili Sloboda
says, but research conducted across the nation offers clear guidelines on
what parents, teachers and communities actually can do. Sloboda, director
of epidemiology and prevention resarch at the National Institute of Drug
Abuse, emphasizes the critical role of parents in staying involved in their
children's lives not just in early childhood, but through adolescence as well.

If this sounds like advice that applies broadly, not just to help children
fend off drugs, that's because it does. Many ``protective factors'' against
drugs also apply in staving off other destructive behavior by children.

Similarly the presence of identified ``risk factors'' in the home, such as
substance abuse by parents, signals not only the probability of drug use by
the children, but of other deviant behavior as well.

A lot of this is common sense about a parent's responsibility that,
unfortunately, has become uncommon. It's no revelation, for example, that
parents who know their children's friends and the parents of those
friends all the way through high school are more likely to be spared the
pain of drug abuse by their offspring.

Robert DuPont, a psychiatrist specializing in the prevention and treatment
of addiction, gives a straightforward directive: Be a nosy parent. Ask
questions; know where your children are and who they are with.

Although family life plays the most important role, positive or negative,
in prevention of drug abuse, the schools and wider community bear
significant responsibilities. They can help to create an antidrug
atmosphere that hammers home two points: Drugs are harmful and can and
do kill. Society, meaning the overwhelming majority of people in any
community, disapproves strongly of drugs.

In many American communities, that kind of outlook doesn't exist, at least
not powerfully enough. It must be created to counter a terrible reality, as
the Partnership for a DrugFree America says, in which the use of drugs is
considered ``normal.''

One stunning statistic tells the sad story: In 1962 fewer than 4 million
Americans had tried illegal drugs. Twentythree years later, by 1985, this
number had soared to nearly 80 million.

The goal must be to erase, not overnight but steadily, the pernicious idea
that drug use is somehow normal. That will take the determination of
parents, of schools that sponsor such antidrug clubs as DFYIT
DrugFree Youth in Town communities that endorse and support prevention,
and advertising campaigns targeted at young people, such as a new one being
developed by the office of Barry McCaffrey, the White House's chief adviser
on drug control policy.

All that, and more, will be required, and not just for a few months or a
couple of years. One reason drug use has increased sharply among eighth
graders and other young children, after years of decline, is that America
let down its guard on drugs and thought the problem was going away. It
hasn't, and it won't to any large degree, unless the antidrug battle never
flags.

Copyright © 1997, SunSentinel Company and South Florida Interactive, Inc.