Environmental Strategies

Our environmental substance abuse prevention strategies seek to identify and reduce the conditions in a community that increase the risk of substance abuse or identify and promote those conditions that reduce the risk of abuse.

How healthy is your community environment? 

• When your (or your neighbor’s) children walk to school every day, what kinds of businesses do they pass?
• Are there stores that sell products that are designed to promote health and well-being?  Or do they pass the neighborhood liquor store next to a drug paraphernalia retailer (smoke shop), or marijuana retailer (dispensary) on their way to school? 
• Are there sidewalks on the route to school, or the youth center, or the neighborhood park? 
• Is the neighborhood park a place that you think is safe for youth or local elders to use? 
• When you drive to work every day, how healthy does  your neighborhood and the businesses in it look to you?

Neighborhood conditions affect all of us, particularly our children, youth, and overstretched parents. We focus on prevention strategies to change the conditions in communities that increase the risk of substance abuse, addiction, and crime.  These problems are threats to the public health and the health of our neighborhoods. 

Our Approach
We approach these issues as public health problems and identify things in the larger community environment that increase the risk of substance abuse instead of focusing efforts on individuals.  If we are to succeed in this effort, we have to focus on confronting conditions that increase substance abuse and the resulting addiction and crime.

We look beyond the individual user/abuser to the group, community, and culture for factors that affect substance abuse.  Community beliefs and attitudes may result in individual or group behavior that can either increase or reduce the risk of substance abuse.  These beliefs are reflected in conditions that affect the use of substances.  Stores in a community that are selling alcohol or cigarettes to minors, and older youth introducing those younger to substances are the end result of these conditions. 

The public health approach is unfamiliar to many community members and challenges many membersâ€� beliefs, particularly those grounded in the American culture of “rugged individualismâ€�.  However, we know it works.  

For more information about environmental substance abuse prevention strategies from a coalition perspective, please review PDF The Coalition Impact: Environmental Prevention Strategies by CADCA.