Hi all,
In the 1990s, Iceland faced a national epidemic of teen substance abuse. In 1998, 42% of Icelandic 15- and 16-year-olds reported having been drunk in the last month. Nearly a quarter smoked cigarettes every day, and 17% had already tried smoking pot. Disturbingly, Iceland was also among the top countries with the percentage who’d been drunk at 13 or younger and the percentage who’d been drunk 10 or more times during the previous year. These numbers alone were concerning but they also presented safety challenges. Among 22 European countries, Icelandic tenth-graders had the second-highest rate of accidents or injuries related to alcohol consumption. With so many teens getting in-your-face drunk, walking in downtown Reykjavik on a Friday night did not feel safe. As the numbers increased through the 1990s, a group of leaders—mainly researchers and politicians--decided to do something about it. They resolved to prevent the problem upstream rather than simply reacting to it. In 1997, this group launched an anti-substance abuse campaign called Drug-free Iceland. They recruited many partners to assist them: policymakers, teachers, parents, police, singers/musicians, health care centers, and many more. Instead of focusing on education or fear-based messaging, the leadership team invested in the passions and interests of the teens. Whatever their ‘natural high’ was, whether music, dance, sports, art, martial arts, or something else, the teens were taught this in distinct classes. The idea was to substitute engagement in substance use with these activities, which fostered courage, strength, and resilience. In addition to investing in the teens’ passions, the leadership team gained the commitment of parents to work towards a substance-free environment. Parents agreed to spend more time together as a family, postpone their child’s first drink until the age of 18, get to know their teen’s friends, and not allow them to have unsupervised parties. They were even given a fridge magnet with the specific times that youth were allowed outside in the evenings (i.e. a ‘soft’ curfew).
The results? In the first few years, protective factors like participating on sports teams and spending time with parents increased. Twenty years after the campaign began, in 2018, teen culture had been transformed. Iceland went from having among the highest to among the lowest rates of teenage drunkenness. Of utmost importance here was that the leadership team took an upstream, preventive approach, and engaged not only the teens but nearly all the major influences on them, including their parents. To read more about this story, click the Behavioral Scientist article here or check out Dan Heath’s book Upstream here.
In the 1990s, Iceland faced a national epidemic of teen substance abuse. In 1998, 42% of Icelandic 15- and 16-year-olds reported having been drunk in the last month. Nearly a quarter smoked cigarettes every day, and 17% had already tried smoking pot. Disturbingly, Iceland was also among the top countries with the percentage who’d been drunk at 13 or younger and the percentage who’d been drunk 10 or more times during the previous year. These numbers alone were concerning but they also presented safety challenges. Among 22 European countries, Icelandic tenth-graders had the second-highest rate of accidents or injuries related to alcohol consumption. With so many teens getting in-your-face drunk, walking in downtown Reykjavik on a Friday night did not feel safe. As the numbers increased through the 1990s, a group of leaders—mainly researchers and politicians--decided to do something about it. They resolved to prevent the problem upstream rather than simply reacting to it. In 1997, this group launched an anti-substance abuse campaign called Drug-free Iceland. They recruited many partners to assist them: policymakers, teachers, parents, police, singers/musicians, health care centers, and many more. Instead of focusing on education or fear-based messaging, the leadership team invested in the passions and interests of the teens. Whatever their ‘natural high’ was, whether music, dance, sports, art, martial arts, or something else, the teens were taught this in distinct classes. The idea was to substitute engagement in substance use with these activities, which fostered courage, strength, and resilience. In addition to investing in the teens’ passions, the leadership team gained the commitment of parents to work towards a substance-free environment. Parents agreed to spend more time together as a family, postpone their child’s first drink until the age of 18, get to know their teen’s friends, and not allow them to have unsupervised parties. They were even given a fridge magnet with the specific times that youth were allowed outside in the evenings (i.e. a ‘soft’ curfew).
The results? In the first few years, protective factors like participating on sports teams and spending time with parents increased. Twenty years after the campaign began, in 2018, teen culture had been transformed. Iceland went from having among the highest to among the lowest rates of teenage drunkenness. Of utmost importance here was that the leadership team took an upstream, preventive approach, and engaged not only the teens but nearly all the major influences on them, including their parents. To read more about this story, click the Behavioral Scientist article here or check out Dan Heath’s book Upstream here.
