Short-term impact of cognition-motivation-emotional intelligence-resistance skills program on drug use prevention for school students in Wuhan,China

Drug abuse continues to be a serious public health threat worldwide. Most drug abuse prevention research has been conducted with predominantly American or European adolescent populations. Little is known about approaches that work best to prevent the initiation of Chinese adolescent drug use. For targeting risk factors of drug initiation in Chinese adolescents, a school-based health intervention program named “Cognition-Motivation-Emotional Intelligence-Resistance Skills” (CMER) was developed to enhance cognition upon drug use, to decrease motivation of drug use and to improve emotional adjusting and drug resistance skills in this study. A total of 798 students from 3 senior high schools in Wuhan, a city in central China, were assigned randomly to intervention and control groups. The intervention group received the CMER program in which knowledge, development of positive attitude and motivation towards drugs and training of peer resistance skills were basic elements. The immediate impact was compared by measuring the above mentioned elements prior to and three-month after the training session. Students from both groups were asked to complete a self-administered questionnaire. The questionnaire included demographic items, self-reported drug use behavior, cognition, attitude, and motivation associated with the initiation of drug use and resistance skills. Three months after the intervention, significant effects were found on “illegal substance use at least once” (P<0.05) between the intervention and control groups. Immediate effects of the intervention were also found on knowledge, motivation and peer resistance skills (P<0.05), but there was no clear evidence for any effects on attitude towards substance use (P>0.05). It was concluded that the CMER program, which significantly increased the knowledge of drugs and peer resistance skills, was effective in the drug abuse prevention in a sample of school students in Wuhan, China.