Iceland brought teen drinking and drug use down significantly through providing and encouraging organized youth activities, parents spending quantity time (not scanty quality time) with kids, curfews, alcohol/tobacco ad and sale restrictions, and frequent surveys, all managed at a national level.
(Or, put another way, unsupervised kids out at night with nothing to do tend to get in trouble.)
There's some behavioral psych around all of this, too (people looking for excitement, people looking for stress relief), but it all sounds a lot like fairly common sense — but of a sort that would be a very difficult sell in the US, and would require a much more sustained effort than we tend to put into anything except military programs.
[h/t +Kee Hinckley]
Iceland knows how to stop teen substance abuse – but the rest of the world isn’t listening
In Iceland, teenage smoking, drinking and drug use have been radically cut in the past 20 years. Emma Young finds out how they did it, and why other countries won’t follow suit.
Those darn scandawhovians, coming up with solutions that work instead of destroying kids lives and throwing them in jail.