New Perspectives in Science Education

Many unhealthy behaviors often begin in adolescence, this represents significant challenges to public health issues (Jaik, Reheana, Ahmed, Finkestein, & Zufilgar, 2016); These unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, drinking and using illicit drugs are closely related to morbidity and mortality (Martinez, 2012). In Colombia, adolescent drug consumption abuse has increased lately, hence the need for designing and implementing educational strategies to prevent and reduce drug consumption, as well as the associated risk factors. The objective of this study is to identify the risk factors associated with drug consumption abuse in adolescents from Casalud Foundation in the municipality of Monteria, the only institution authorized to attend restitution and rights protection processes in adolescents. This study is a cross-sectional retrospective descriptive research with a mixed method approach for the methodology. The results corresponded to the statistical analysis done at 135 clinical histories of treated adolescents in 2018. It was evidenced that the most prominent risk factors were those related to the person, the family, and school and friends context. These factors identification becomes essential for addressing the interventions. According to the gathered results and the particular case, actions should be focused on families as the first protective factor, on the person by encouraging them in the decision making process and their lifelong learning skills and on the recognition of adolescents as subjects of rights. In Conclusion, these results were  in agreement with Losada (2017) who after evaluating and knowing the educational needs and prevention actions of a group, considered necessary to understand and tackle the drug phenomenon from the health education perspective into two contexts, one directed to general population , and the other to specific cases of people at high risk of falling into drug abuse, or already being drug abuser , in order to prevent them from continuing doing so.

Keywords: Risk factors, health education, drugs, adolescents.

References:
[1] Jaik, D., Reheana, A., Ahmed, A., Finkestein, Y., & Zufilgar, A. B. (2016). Interventions for adolescent substance abuse: A overview of sistematic reviews. ELSEVIER.
[2] Martinez, I. M. (2012). Efectos de la exposición y calidad de la prevención escolar en el consumo de drogas y factores de riesgo de estudiantes de secundaria. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Psicología, Madrid.
[3] Losada Salgado, N. y. (2017). Drogas y educación: Una revisión bibliografica. Drugs and Addictive Behavior.