Unplugged is “an effective school-based program for the prevention of substance use among adolescents” implemented in several European countries and containing a social norms component. We give you the Preface to “Eudap Final Technical Report n.1.”

Preface

EU-Dap, the European Drug Addiction Prevention trial, is a multicenter study implemented by nine partners from seven different European countries. EU-Dap project has been funded by the European Commission within the Community Programme for the prevention of drug dependence in 2002. The project aimed both to develop a theory-based school program for the prevention of use of tobacco, drugs and alcohol, and to assess its effectiveness by mean of a rigorous experimental design. UNPLUGGED, the program’s name, has been developed by the EU-Dap Intervention Planning Group, and evaluated during the 2004-2005 school year among about 7000 12-14 years old students. On a short-term follow-up the program was able to reduce the use of tobacco, drugs, and intoxication drinking by 25-30% compared to the expected trends. The results are in publication in the scientific literature, and details can be found in the project’s web site (www.eudap.net). The medium term evaluation is in progress and the results will be soon available. In the meantime, this manual presents the instructions for the implementation of the program in schools, as it has been used during the evaluation study. During the experimental implementation several problems emerged, indicating that the program needs improvement, which is planned during the coming months. For this reason a caution statement has been added in the introduction for those wanting to apply the program in the present form. We do hope that this manual will be useful for the schools’ drug prevention activities, and we are grateful to those of you that will help the EU-Dap group’s revision task with comments and suggestions.

Prof. Fabrizio Faggiano
Avogadro University – Italy
Project coordinator

________________________________________________________________-

Here are some additional references for the “Unplugged” trial:

Faggiano, F., Richardson, C., Bohrn, K., Galanti, M. R., & EU-Dap Study Group. (2007). A cluster randomized controlled trial of school-based prevention of tobacco, alcohol and drug use: The EU-Dap design and study population.Preventive medicine, 44(2), 170-173.

Vigna‐Taglianti, F. D., Galanti, M. R., Burkhart, G., Caria, M. P., Vadrucci, S., & Faggiano, F. (2014). “Unplugged,” a European school‐based program for substance use prevention among adolescents: Overview of results from the EU‐Dap trial. New directions for youth development, 2014(141), 67-82.

Faggiano, F., Galanti, M. R., Bohrn, K., Richardson, C., Burkhart, G., Cuomo, L., … & Wiborg, G. (2006, July). Effectiveness of a school-program against smoking in Europe: early results from the EU-Dap trial. In The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health.

Vadrucci, S., Vigna-Taglianti, F. D., van der Kreeft, P., Vassara, M., Scatigna, M., Faggiano, F., … & EU-Dap Study Group. (2015). The theoretical model of the school-based prevention programme Unplugged. Global Health Promotion, 1757975915579800.