Executive Summary

Drug abuse and addiction are major global public health challenges. Deaths caused by drug use increased 60 percent in the past 15 years. These trends have dramatically worsened in the COVID-19 pandemic. While youth in generally wealthier countries have access to efficacious substance abuse interventions, most children in the rest of the world do not. When they do have access, prevention programs are seldom culturally appropriate or sustainable. ASU is working to reach 1.1 million youth, 18,750 teachers, and 3,750 schools across 15 countries. We will: 1) Engage in an equitable, community-based campaign to adapt, implement, and evaluate keepin’ it REAL (kiR), an efficacious substance abuse prevention program; 2) Enhance community capacity to ensure lasting results of kiR; and 3) Bring to scale the dissemination and adoption of kiR. This initiative will facilitate collaboration between communities with similar needs, and improve the long-term health of communities in ways that are culturally appropriate, feasible, efficacious, replicable, and sustainable.

Accomplishments

In the past year, we have successfully pivoted our ongoing projects to begin working on data analysis and manuscript writing. We published a number of non-technical reports and held virtual community presentations.