(The following are excerpts from Part II of the Final Report -  Prevention and Education)

School-based prevention:

• In order to target the average age of onset of drug use, a comprehensive school-based prevention program should engage children from kindergarten through high school, or at least through the middle school or junior high school years. School based programs should not only involve parents, but should also collaborate with community organizations and programs.
  
• The most effective school and community prevention programs are comprehensive and involve a broad range of components, including teaching social competence and drug resistance skills, promoting positive peer influences and antidrug social norms, emphasizing skills-training teaching methods, and providing multiple years of intervention.

See Safe and Drug Free Schools:
www.ed.gov/offices/OESE/SDFS/

Community-based prevention:

• Research has shown that methamphetamine users are generally exposed to elevated levels of risk factors. Programs targeting risk and protective factors seek to reduce risk factors and enhance protective factors.

• Ideally, community prevention programs should include cross-disciplinary training so that prevention and education, treatment, and law enforcement officials can share their knowledge and build stronger programs.

Parenting:

• Prevention programs can enhance protective factors among young children by teaching parents about better family communication, discipline, rulemaking, and other parenting skills. Research has shown that parents should take an active role in their children’s lives; talking with them about drugs, monitoring their activities, knowing their friends, and understanding their problems and personal concerns.

More information needed:

• More methamphetamine research is needed, including research on the initiation to and progression of use.
  
• Researchers also need more data on methamphetamine users, including demographics and ethnography, their motivations, and the risk factors that lead to use of methamphetamine and other drugs.
  
• In particular, specific data on methamphetamine use among adolescents are needed, such as their motivations, risk factors, and attitudes toward methamphetamine use.