Abstract
In recent years, the Internet has received increasing recognition as an effective means of facilitating public health interventions. In particular, delivering prevention for substance use to school students via the Internet appears to be an area of great potential. The Climate Schools: Ecstasy and Emerging Drugs Module, a school-based prevention program, facilitated by the Internet, was developed to address the use of ecstasy and new and emerging drugs (Emerging Psychoactive Substances or Novel Psychoactive Substances). This four-lesson course was designed to be delivered to Australian adolescents (aged 15 to 16 years) during their standard health education classes at school, and is based on a harm-minimisation and social influence approach. The program was developed in response to the important public health challenge of new and emerging drugs as well as to address the prevention of ecstasy use among young people. To our knowledge, this will be the first school- and Internet-based prevention program specifically targeting these substances. This paper describes the process involved in developing this new Internet-based substance use prevention program.
Highlights
Over the past decade, the Internet has emerged as a promising mode of delivering public health interventions
This paper proposes that prevention for new and emerging drugs (NEDs) can be delivered via the Internet, in conjunction with an existing universal prevention program for ecstasy, known as the Climate Schools: Ecstasy Module
The current paper describes the development of the Climate Schools: Ecstasy and Emerging Drugs Module, a four-lesson Internet-based prevention program developed to address and prevent the use of NEDs and ecstasy among adolescents
Summary
The Internet has emerged as a promising mode of delivering public health interventions. There are clear recommendations that education for NEDs should be delivered alongside education for traditional drugs [20] [21] and it is practical and efficient for teachers to deliver education for these drugs together, as lesson time dedicated to drug education is often limited These advantages of simultaneous delivery, coupled with the fact that there are no existing evidence-based programs for NEDs, positions the Climate Schools: Ecstasy Module as an ideal basis upon which to incorporate education about NEDs. The below section describes the methods of developing the integrated Climate Schools: Ecstasy and Emerging Drugs Module
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
