Today we are launching our latest publication in the field of prevention. ‘Drug prevention interventions targeting minority ethnic populations’ is a Thematic paper that comes as part of the agency’s monitoring of action 20 of the European Union drugs action plan 2009–12 on developing services for minority groups, including migrants. It contains the results of a study carried out via questionnaire that examined drug prevention interventions for minority ethnic populations in 29 European countries. A total of 33 interventions were reported to the study and the issues they raise are presented and discussed in the paper. These results will add to the agency’s existing information on this topic and inform the EMCDDA’s plans for 2013–15 in terms of monitoring drug prevention interventions.
This report comes at a time when the EMCDDA’s manual on European drug prevention quality standards, released in 2011, has once again been in the spotlight. The manual was recently selected by the American Library Association as a ‘Notable Government Document’ of 2011, in the ‘International’ category. The publication sets quality benchmarks on how to develop prevention in organisational and logistical terms, giving guidance on how to choose programmes, how to adapt them and how to select the workforce implementing them. Work from the project group that prepared this manual will soon move to a second phase including additional tools for the implementation of the standards in the group’s partner countries (Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Sweden and UK). Translations of the manual, along with extra sources of information, are available on our website with Polish and Hungarian versions already available and more languages in the pipeline.
Work in the field of prevention has also recently been enhanced by a new UNODC handbook on International Standards on Drug Use Prevention, which complements the EMCDDA’s manual and reports. While the EMCDDA’s manual on European drug prevention quality standards focuses on how to do prevention, the UNODC manual adds to it what to do in prevention.
Update 20 June: We have now released another Thematic paper on this topic. Called ‘North American drug prevention programmes: are they feasible in European cultures and contexts’, the paper documents the process of transferring successful prevention programmes from North America to EU Member States, analysing how such programmes adapt to different cultural contexts.
