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The article presents an interview with Ellen Morehouse, as well as discusses student assistance programs which work to prevent adolescent drug and substance abuse. Several program models are available to counselors that will help in their substance abuse programs, including the core team model in which school staff receive training but are assisted by student teams. Moorehouse emphasizes the fact that her program and others help to prevent substance abuse from the beginning and that they are easily accessible to teenagers and their families. She also recommends to anyone that wants to start a similar program to make sure that the principal and superintendent of their school fully support and help in the program's creation.

This article explores how Mexican-American youth experience stress and trauma in a variety of arenas. Such youth utilize their energy, creativity, and resilience in order to cope with cultural tensions that arise from acculturative processes, role conflicts with family and peers, school challenges, and identity formation processes. Violence, in the form of internalized colonialism, external oppression, and actual violent acts (e.g., gang fights, suicides, and physical and/or sexual abuse), can be a major risk factor for negative outcomes such as substance abuse. However, this ethnographic study demonstrates that many Mexican-American adolescents navigate stressors and traumas in such a way that transforms the potentially distressing events into life-affirming rites of passage. This article explores these issues through qualitative data analyses from a study of Mexican-American youth in a Southwestern city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to present the Harm Reduction Model and its potential as a framework from which to provide prevention services for adolescents. While it may be uncomfortable for service providers to acknowledge, the vast majority of adolescents in the United States will have used mood-altering substances sometime during their teen years. While non-abstinence-based prevention services have existed for some time, they are not without controversy. This article proposes Harm Reduction as a complimentary or alternative perspective for work with adolescents for whom abstinence may not be immediately possible and/or may not be a realistic outcome for services. This article outlines the abstinence-oriented and Harm Reduction perspectives, as well as the Stages of Change model; utilizing empirical support, it then discusses how these perspectives can work together in social work practice in the adolescent substance abuse prevention arena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]