The unseen success of preventing substance abuse among teenagers
The four o’clock bell rings, the iron school gates creak open, and another lesson on the perils of substances ends. A fifteen-year-old boy walks out, having just stared at a poster of a blackened lung or nodded politely while an officer explained how a single habit can unspool a lifetime. Then he steps out into the afternoon. He walks home, or lingers at a corner store, or reaches into his pocket for his phone.
What happens in the next five hours matters more than everything he heard behind a desk.
Also Read: Amit Shah says Punjab drug trade more harrowing than official reports suggest
Does he have someone to talk to when the kitchen lights come on? Is there somewhere he needs to be before dinner? Does he have a reason—a small, stubborn reason—to wake up early tomorrow? These questions sound like they belong to domestic life or random luck, but public health data tells a different story.
A multi-site study published in The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia surveyed more than 6,000 adolescents across 108 schools and found that 21.4 percent sat at moderate or high risk for substance use. Easy access, relentless digital noise, and volatile environments pushed that risk upward, while a simple counterweight pulled it down: active social engagement. The environment around a teenager does not just background his life; it builds the rails he runs on.
Most research on adolescent drug use focuses on the visible wreckage. We know a great deal about the teenagers who drift, the circles they keep, and the fractures at home. But we know almost nothing about the boy sitting on the very next bench who was offered the exact same escape and said no. His story leaves no footprints. The greatest victories of prevention are, by their very nature, completely invisible.
Even so, research is beginning to map what keeps kids grounded. A study spanning Mumbai and Kolkata published in BMC Public Health linked "school connectedness"—the feeling of safety, happiness, and belonging within classroom walls—to a lower susceptibility to tobacco use. Similarly, a study in the Journal of Adolescent Research examining teenagers navigating high-risk environments where family addiction was part of the furniture found that the kids named their own shields: parents who listened, healthy ways to burn off stress, distance from bad company, and something in their lives that mattered more than getting high.
None of this is a neat mathematical equation. A boy sliding into substance use often drops out of the team first, meaning cause and effect run both ways. Prevention cannot promise absolute armor; it can only build resilience.
Look at Iceland, where a deliberate cultural shift between 1998 and 2016 saw the share of intoxicated fifteen-year-olds plummet from 42 percent to 5 percent, while sports participation doubled. Parents, schools, and communities locked arms, flooding kids' lives with sport, music, and art, anchored by adults who actually knew where they were on a Friday night. It is no copy-paste recipe, but it whispers an enduring truth: a teenager’s choices are often a reflection of the architecture of their surroundings.
Belonging, of course, is a double-edged sword. Plenty of teenagers first try substances inside a community—at a college fest, a rooftop birthday, or behind a friend’s terrace wall. For them, the drug is a counterfeit form of membership. The secret is making sure the healthy alternatives—the football squad, the debate club, the neighborhood band—are more electric and easier to join than the alternative.
Today, much of adolescent life has retreated behind the glass of a phone, where no school gate or neighborhood curfew can reach. That makes the adults standing in the physical world irreplaceable: the parent who catches a subtle shift in eye contact over dinner, the teacher who notices a loud kid has gone strangely quiet. Law enforcement plays its vital part by maintaining public order and choking off supply, but prevention begins upstream, long before the first experiment.
In most neighborhoods, this quiet infrastructure is already running, though no one ever slaps a "prevention" label on it.
It is the cricket coach waiting at the maidan at six in the morning, noting instantly who failed to show up. It is the school kabaddi team, the local akhara where an old mentor decides who takes training seriously, and the gully football match that breaks up only when dusk swallows the ball. It is the tabla teacher treating a restless boy like an artist-in-training, the dance class where a shy girl finds her spine, and the local festival committee trusting teenagers with real responsibilities. It is the NCC parade, the NSS camp, and the neighborhood librarian who knows every regular by name.
We will never be able to tally the disasters these places avert. But a teenager with a rehearsal tomorrow, a team that depends on his presence, and an elder who would notice if he vanished has a reason to say no that no warning poster can ever replicate.
The true triumph of prevention is never the number of kids we pull back from the edge. It is the staggering number of them who never needed to be rescued in the first place.
The article is authored by Navdeep Aggarwal, IPS, Additional Deputy Commissioner (ADC) to the Hon’ble Governor of Maharashtra.
What happens in the next five hours matters more than everything he heard behind a desk.
Also Read: Amit Shah says Punjab drug trade more harrowing than official reports suggest
Does he have someone to talk to when the kitchen lights come on? Is there somewhere he needs to be before dinner? Does he have a reason—a small, stubborn reason—to wake up early tomorrow? These questions sound like they belong to domestic life or random luck, but public health data tells a different story.
A multi-site study published in The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia surveyed more than 6,000 adolescents across 108 schools and found that 21.4 percent sat at moderate or high risk for substance use. Easy access, relentless digital noise, and volatile environments pushed that risk upward, while a simple counterweight pulled it down: active social engagement. The environment around a teenager does not just background his life; it builds the rails he runs on.
Most research on adolescent drug use focuses on the visible wreckage. We know a great deal about the teenagers who drift, the circles they keep, and the fractures at home. But we know almost nothing about the boy sitting on the very next bench who was offered the exact same escape and said no. His story leaves no footprints. The greatest victories of prevention are, by their very nature, completely invisible.
Even so, research is beginning to map what keeps kids grounded. A study spanning Mumbai and Kolkata published in BMC Public Health linked "school connectedness"—the feeling of safety, happiness, and belonging within classroom walls—to a lower susceptibility to tobacco use. Similarly, a study in the Journal of Adolescent Research examining teenagers navigating high-risk environments where family addiction was part of the furniture found that the kids named their own shields: parents who listened, healthy ways to burn off stress, distance from bad company, and something in their lives that mattered more than getting high.
None of this is a neat mathematical equation. A boy sliding into substance use often drops out of the team first, meaning cause and effect run both ways. Prevention cannot promise absolute armor; it can only build resilience.
Look at Iceland, where a deliberate cultural shift between 1998 and 2016 saw the share of intoxicated fifteen-year-olds plummet from 42 percent to 5 percent, while sports participation doubled. Parents, schools, and communities locked arms, flooding kids' lives with sport, music, and art, anchored by adults who actually knew where they were on a Friday night. It is no copy-paste recipe, but it whispers an enduring truth: a teenager’s choices are often a reflection of the architecture of their surroundings.
Belonging, of course, is a double-edged sword. Plenty of teenagers first try substances inside a community—at a college fest, a rooftop birthday, or behind a friend’s terrace wall. For them, the drug is a counterfeit form of membership. The secret is making sure the healthy alternatives—the football squad, the debate club, the neighborhood band—are more electric and easier to join than the alternative.
Today, much of adolescent life has retreated behind the glass of a phone, where no school gate or neighborhood curfew can reach. That makes the adults standing in the physical world irreplaceable: the parent who catches a subtle shift in eye contact over dinner, the teacher who notices a loud kid has gone strangely quiet. Law enforcement plays its vital part by maintaining public order and choking off supply, but prevention begins upstream, long before the first experiment.
In most neighborhoods, this quiet infrastructure is already running, though no one ever slaps a "prevention" label on it.
It is the cricket coach waiting at the maidan at six in the morning, noting instantly who failed to show up. It is the school kabaddi team, the local akhara where an old mentor decides who takes training seriously, and the gully football match that breaks up only when dusk swallows the ball. It is the tabla teacher treating a restless boy like an artist-in-training, the dance class where a shy girl finds her spine, and the local festival committee trusting teenagers with real responsibilities. It is the NCC parade, the NSS camp, and the neighborhood librarian who knows every regular by name.
We will never be able to tally the disasters these places avert. But a teenager with a rehearsal tomorrow, a team that depends on his presence, and an elder who would notice if he vanished has a reason to say no that no warning poster can ever replicate.
The true triumph of prevention is never the number of kids we pull back from the edge. It is the staggering number of them who never needed to be rescued in the first place.
The article is authored by Navdeep Aggarwal, IPS, Additional Deputy Commissioner (ADC) to the Hon’ble Governor of Maharashtra.
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)