• The ATLAS Program (Athletes Training and Learning to Avoid Steroids)
  This is a multi-component, school-based, substance abuse prevention program for male high school athletes (13 to 19 years old). The classroom sessions involve role plays, student-created campaigns, and educational games that teach students, among other lessons, how to debunk media images that promote substance abuse. The effectiveness of this strategy was reflected in a program evaluation study, which indicated that the program reduced substance abuse risk factors, including a lessened belief in media advertisement, among participants.

  Contact Information: Division of Health Promotion and Sports Medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University; phone: (503) 494-6559; Web site: www.ohsu.edu/hpsm/atlas.html

• Challenging College Alcohol Abuse
  Challenging College Alcohol Abuse uses social norms and environmental management strategies to prevent alcohol abuse among college-aged students. The Social Norms Media Marketing Campaign is the primary component of the program. It targets students, resident advisors, parents, stakeholders, and others who may be reading school newspapers or are involved in other school-related activities or media.

  Contact Information: University of Arizona; phone: (520) 571-7849

• Mpowerment
  This is a community-building program designed to reduce the frequency of unprotected anal intercourse among young gay and bisexual men. It was developed through an intensive social marketing process with young gay men and is based on an empowerment model in which young gay men take charge of the project.

  Contact Information: Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at University of California, San Francisco; phone: (415) 597-9306

• Project TNT (Towards No Tobacco Use)
  This is a school-based program designed to delay the initiation and reduce the use of tobacco by middle school children. The program aims to help young children resist using tobacco products by becoming aware of misleading social information, developing skills that counteract social pressure to use tobacco, and learning about the physical consequences of tobacco use, such as addiction. The program’s activities include helping students identify how the media and advertisers influence teens to use tobacco products.

  Contact Information: Stephan G. Hauk, Dissemination Coordinator, Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research, University of Southern California; phone: (800) 400-8461.

• Project STAR (Students Taught Awareness and Resistance—also known as the Midwestern Prevention Project)
  This is a drug-abuse prevention program that reaches the entire community with a comprehensive school program, mass media efforts, a parent program, community organization, and health policy change. The mass media component—consisting of approximately 31 television, radio, and print broadcasts per year—promotes, reinforces, and helps maintain the project. This component is implemented throughout the five-year program.

  Contact Information: Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California; phone: (323) 865-0325

Other effective programs use communications as one of their strategies, for example:

• Life Skills Training Program
  Contact Information: National Health Promotion Associates, Inc.; phone: (914) 421-2525; Web site: www.lifeskillstraining.com
  
  
• Project ALERT
  Contact Information: Best Foundation; phone: (800) ALERT-10; Web site: www.projectalert.com
  
  
• Communities Mobilizing for Change Alcohol
  Contact Information: School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota; phone: (612) 626-7435; Web site: www.epi.umn.edu/alcohol
  
  
• Lion’s-Quest Working Towards Peace
  Contact Information: Quest International; phone: (740) 522-6400; Web site: www.lions-quest.org

For more information on these and other effective programs, visit the Northeast CAPT’s Database of Prevention Programs, available at http://www.hhd.org/capt/default.asp.