Environmental strategies
Environmental Strategies
Environmental strategies are prevention strategies aimed at altering the immediate cultural, social, physical and economic environments in which people make their choices about drug use.
This perspective takes into account the fact that individuals do not become involved with substances solely on the basis of personal characteristics. Rather, they are influenced by a complex set of factors in the environment, such as what is considered normal, expected or accepted in the communities in which they live, the rules or regulations and taxes of their states, the publicity messages to which they are exposed, and the availability of alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs. Because substance abuse is viewed as a product of the overall system, the rationale of environmental prevention strategies is to target the community at large.
In concrete terms, environmental strategies often include unfashionable components, like the control of markets or coercive measures (age controls, tobacco bans). They have therefore an important potential for social debate as they challenge culture-bound understanding of society and public health. For example, in the eyes of many people behavioural epidemics (obesity, tobacco and alcohol use) are only a matter of private concern and of personal choices, where the State must not intervene. For public health advocates they are "industrial epidemics" (i.e. where strong industry interests are entangled and behind), and public-health policies are called for action in protection of the vulnerable, especially young people. The concept is applied almost only to legal drugs, while drug prohibition turns most environmental approaches obsolete for illegal drugs. However, beyond these aspects of coercion and restriction there are promotion elements: in the sense of providing opportunities, stimuli and encouragement for changes. These are included in several policies at school or local community level.
Drug use as a behaviour is independent from the legal status of substances, and almost all prevention policies in Europe take this into consideration while covering legal and illegal substance in prevention interventions. Environmental strategies - despite targeting predominantly legal drugs - are important for the whole prevention field because early, widespread and intense use of alcohol and tobacco are related to illicit drug use in many countries.
Settings
Many environmental strategies are implemented at state (macro) or even EU level. Examples are smoking bans, total or only in working places, additional taxes on alcohol and tobacco, marketing and advertisement regulations (beyond the voluntary codes of industry umbrella organisations) and age limits for tobacco or alcohol sales to youth. Read more about the level of tobacco control in Europe, measured by the Tobacco Control Scale.
Read more about the level of alcohol control in Europe.
- School
- Community
- Family
School
Environmental strategies in schools exist in the form of school policies: norms and regulation on school level about legal and illegal drug use in schools and how to deal with illicit drug use or selling in school premises. Comparative European data on the development of school policies will be soon available here.
Complementing restrictive aspects, there are increasingly school policies that aim at providing protective school environments and positive school climates.
Community
At this micro-level of environmental prevention, there is wide range of possible interventions, which are only partly monitored until now: venue, retailer and event licensing, restricting retailer opening hours, but also municipal working groups with leisure industry and prevention partners, as pro-active and collaborative policing. The development of municipal plans is a first step in this direction. Especially for recreational settings, opening hours (also specifically for underage youth), public transport provision to venues, prices of non-alcoholic beverage and rules about street violence and consumption in open spaces are and can be regulated at local level. Seemingly it depends largely on cultural traditions whether communitarian or only individual rights are advocated for.
Family
Research has identified also some environmental aspects relevant for families. Beside known protective factors like common rules and monitoring in families, a recent report from UK (Bellis et al. 2007) has identified family-controlled initiation rituals into alcohol use and restricted pocket money as likely effective environmental strategies at family level.
General
Cannabis
Tobacco
- Smoking bans in the EU
- Smoking bans in the US
- Attitudes to smoking and smoking bans (EC, 2007)
- Report on Tobacco control in the EU (The ASPECT Consortium, 2004)
- Progress in Tobacco Control in 30 European Countries, 2005 to 2007
- The Tobacco Atlas
- Economics of tobacco control (World Bank)
