Substance Abuse - Research Paper Example

? Substance Abuse at Lexington, Ky Lecturer Substance abuse is a major challenge in the society today. In most studies, youths are the onesidentified with this vice. Substance and drug abuse has resulted into a delinquent lifestyle among the youths in the community. This has led to criminal acts exhibited by the victims of substance abuse who consequently become addicts. However, there are various local agencies attempting to reduce such delinquent lifestyle resulting from addiction and substance and drug abuse. Such agencies offer services to the addicts at the community level using community programs. This paper therefore seeks to illustrate services offered to the addicts through community based programs used by the local agencies in Lexington Ky. USA. The paper will also determine what the community is missing and discuss the service that is not offered in the community currently. Some of the local agencies that offer addiction services in the community include the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) which is located in The Hope Center, Charter Ridge Hospital. Together with the Eastern State and Behavioral Medicine Group, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) which has regional background I Lexington Ky. USA offers the addiction services to the addicts. The two agencies have developed a community program to prevent or deter youths from serious delinquent behavior and help addicts. This program is referred to as Communities That Care (CTC) program which is used in majority of communities in the United States as well as in my residential area, Lexington Ky. The Hope Center, Charter Ridge Hospital, Eastern State and Behavioral Medicine Group provides the addiction services through The Communities That Care (CTC) program which is aimed to offer addiction services that improve the lives of people in Lexington Ky, USA who are involved with gambling, alcohol, tobacco, or other substances. The goal of the program is to help the individual addicts, their friends and family as well as the community entirely. Some of the services offered include: free and confidential treatment and prevention services and resources to the addicts; offering information to the policy makers to assist in promoting and protecting the health of the community; services that meets the needs of the addicts in the community; and empowerment and awareness which supports research and provide accurate information on prevention and treatment of the addicts in the community (Gibbs, 2001). The agency also offers a variety of programs through the Communities That Care (CTC) program such as: residential inpatient programs which deals with the addicts who depend on drugs severely; day and night programs to the addicts who find it challenging to socialize with others during treatments; outpatient rehabilitation for the addicts who relapses; evidence based therapies involving peer group conversation, family based therapy, and individual counseling. These are the services that the community is missing and are now offered by the Communities That Care (CTC) program. The above mentioned services are offered by the Communities That Care (CTC) program through public health approach in preventing and deterring youth problems and behaviors like delinquency, violence, school dropout, and substance and drug abuse in my community, Lexington Ky. The community, decision makers and stakeholders apply and understand the information about protective and risk factors, and programs that have been proven to produce difference in promoting acceptable healthy youth development, so as to effectively address the specified problems and issues that face the youth in their community (Lawrence, 2000). It is the aim of the The Hope Center, Charter Ridge Hospital, Eastern State and Behavioral Medicine Group through the Community That Care as a program, to guide the efforts of people in Lexington Ky, USA to prevent and treat addicts of substance and drug abuse, through specified phases. The phases of this process include: Getting started: where the readiness of a community, is assessed, to take part in efforts of collaborative prevention Get organized: the community leader get to commit them into the Communities That Care program and forms a representative and diverse coalition of prevention. Develop a profile: this where the data from epidemiology is used to assess the needs of prevention. Create a plan: in this phase, a selection of already tested and effective prevention programs, practices, and policies that are based on the data already assessed. Implement and evaluate: the new strategies are implemented with fidelity in a way that is congruent with the theory of the program, its methods of delivery, its content and nature, and evaluating the progress of the program over a given period of time. According to Miller (1995), the findings of the evaluation of Communities That Care program effectiveness. The program’s identification of protective and risk factors offers the foundation for the advances that prevent behavior problems and adolescent health. Communities That Care program has been tested by prevention scientists rigorously, they have also set the policies have been put to address the protective and risk factors in their studies. They have also identified other range of approaches of prevention to help deter delinquent lifestyle. The Communities That Care program, have been proven by these researchers to effectively prevent a deviance behavior among the youths in the community. 56 effective policies and programs have been proven effective in the above mentioned peer reviewed article, these policies and programs are inference in the Communities That Care Prevention Strategies Guide. According to Gibbs (2001) in his article, “Toward theories about criminal justice: Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, “sixteen of the programs have been proven after tests conducted twice with the same findings replicated. They have been also termed a Blueprint Model Programs, and if they are followed rigorously, they will reduce the delinquent lifestyle among the youths significantly. These programs often range from early childhood and parental interventions to the policies of the community that are related to alcohol, emotional skills, and school based curricula teaching social skills that will help the youths navigate their life. A study carried out by John (2005) on evaluating the efforts of the Hope Center, Charter Ridge Hospital, Eastern State and Behavioral Medicine Group in providing addiction services have detailed the efforts of the community to implement the Community That Care Prevention Strategies due to its affectivity in preventing substance abuse among youths. Miller (2010) has evaluated the attempts by the community and local agencies to implement the effective and tested programs and the core principles of the prevention system of the program respective of its delivery and content specifications. The findings of the study revealed that the Communities That Care communities achieved very high implementation reliability on the program and system levels when technical and training assistance supports the Community That Care as a program. Communities that were used as control never met these elements. At the beginning of the study, the communities using the program and the control community were at the same level in use of the intervention by the approach based on science. At the end of three years of strict implementation of the intervention, the leaders in the Communities That Care communities revealed a report of a high adoption of the prevention using the science based approach save for the control communities. The communities using the program intervention were also willing to fund the prevention program due to the positive effects it had on the youths in the community. Significant differences were sustained a year after the phase of implementation ended. The leaders in the Communities That Care community program gave a report of the norms of the community against drug abuse among adolescents. The milestones and benchmarks of the Communities That Care were used in tracking the implementation progress of the components of the Communities That Care prevention system. According to the study, the Communities That Care program have enacted a 90% average of key features of the prevention system which include: prioritizing protective and risk factors, developing a board of community, implementing the selected program implementation with fidelity, selecting effective and tested preventive interventions from the program prevention strategies, and assessing protective and risk factors periodically as well as adolescent and child well being via student surveys. The community coalitions implemented the benchmarks and milestones of the Communities That Care continuously to a greater extent as opposed to the community coalitions in the control communities. The results of the study states that the control communities never made any significant progress in the due time in accomplishing the benchmarks and milestones in scientifically implementing prevention programs that have been proven, as well as monitoring the impacts of the program. Therefore it can be conclusively inferred that the Communities That Care program is effective and will deter or prevent youths from turning to a delinquent lifestyle and committing crimes in the society. The community, from the paper, has hence adopted programs to help in deterring or preventing substance abuse. As mentioned in the paper, a community based program, Communities That Care, has been adopted. From the studies mentioned in the paper, the Communities That Care program has proven that it is effective and is easily implementable among the youth in the community. For instance, Communities That Care program has been tested by prevention scientists rigorously, they have also set the policies have been put to address the protective and risk factors in their studies. They have also identified other range of approaches of prevention to help deter substance abuse. The Communities That Care program, have been proven by these researchers to effectively prevent a deviance behavior and substance abuse among the youths in the community. The program was experimented between two communities of which one used the program and the other did not. The findings of the study revealed that the control communities never made any significant progress in the due time in accomplishing the benchmarks and milestones in scientifically implementing prevention programs that have been proven, as well as monitoring the impacts of the program. In the contrary, the community that adopted the program showed significant changes and progress in preventing the adoption of a delinquent lifestyle. References Gibbs, J. P. (2001). Toward theories about criminal justice. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 4(1), 20-36.  John, R. (2005). Prevention and treatment of substance and drug addicts. London: Prentice Hall. Lawrence, M. (2000). Substance and Drug Abuse Prevention. New York: Basic Books. Miller, M. (2010). Covert participant observation: Reconsidering the least used method. Journal of Substance abuse, 11(2), 97-105. Read More