NE Choices was a major drugs prevention programme which targeted 13 to 16-year-olds in the north-east of England between 1996 and 1999. It had explicit drug use prevention, prevalence reduction and harm minimisation behaviour change objectives.
The intervention had everything going for it: strong theoretical underpinnings; a multi-component design, combining a schools intervention with community, media and stakeholder activity; extensive, long term resources (the programme lasted three years plus a one-year pilot and an additional year of follow-up); a comprehensive bank of formative, process and impact evaluations to inform its development and implementation; and a quasi-experimental design to measure its effect on behaviour.
But it did not work. Despite consistently and markedly positive formative, process and impact results, it did not change behaviour.
This paper examines the lessons that emerge from NE Choices. It begins with a conventional analysis, which suggests a need for relatively straightforward alterations to the intervention, starting at an earlier age, for example, or making the evaluation more rigorous. The paper then looks at some of the intervention's strengths, before taking a more radical perspective, and using learning from social marketing to call for a fundamental rethink of the 'intervention mentality'.
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