Prevention Profiles: Take Five Featuring Tessa Miracle, Ph.D. and Emily Baker, Ph.D.

Lucey: Hi, everyone and welcome to this episode of Prevention Profiles: Take Five.

I’m Rich Lucey, Senior Prevention Program Manager in the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Community Outreach and Prevention Support Section.

Excited to have two guests on today’s episode of the podcast.

Let me tell you a little bit about Tessa Miracle and Emily Baker.

So Dr. Tessa Miracle is Principal Investigator of the College Prescription Drug Study and a lecturer in the College of Pharmacy at the Ohio State University.

She has served as coordinator and evaluator of statewide initiatives across Ohio to develop statewide and community capacity for the implementation of evidence based strategies to decrease prescription drug misuse.

She has served as a regional leader by facilitating and integrating resources and prevention efforts in areas such as prescription drugs, marijuana, alcohol, HIV AIDS, sexual violence, integrated behavioral health and mental health awareness.

She has experience using the Strategic Prevention Framework to guide county and regional coalitions through strategic planning, implementation and evaluation.

Dr. Emily Baker is a Postdoctoral scholar in the College of Pharmacy at the Ohio State University.

In her role she coordinated and conducted the 2022 Administration of the College Prescription Drug Study.

She had previously earned her master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling from the University of Cincinnati and her doctorate and counselor education from Ohio State.

Her clinical and research focus is focused on substance use prevention and treatment with a passion for harm reduction and trauma informed care.

With that, Tessa and Emily, welcome to the podcast.

>> Thank you so much for having us.

We’re very excited to be here.

>> I’m excited to be here as well.

Lucey: Yeah, it’s fun to have two guests on the podcast.

We don’t usually have that.

It’s only happened once before so you know you’re in some kind of hallowed ground if you will in having a couple of guests.

And I’m really excited to talk about the study.

I know that a previous podcast a few years ago we had Dr. Erica Phillips on and talked about that iteration of the study and the findings.

And let me let our listeners know right off the bat that on the day that this interview posts on campusdrugprevention.gov we will post the actual study itself and the findings we’re going to talk about today.

So before we get into the five questions, Tessa, I’m going to start with you.

Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the College Prescription Drugs Study, its purpose and the respondents?

Tessa: Absolutely, and I just want to give a little nod since you did mention our predecessors in implementing the study.

I just want to thank them for allowing us to usher it through its 2022 implementation and just to honor that.

We are not the original designers of the study, but we are kind of standing on the shoulders of giants as we continue moving the study forward.

So College Prescription Drugs Study which you might hear us default to calling it CPDS is a multi-institutional survey of undergraduate, graduate and professional students that examines the nonmedical use of prescription drugs, including usage of these drugs, reasons for and consequences of use, perceived access to prescription drugs and perceptions of use among their peers.

This survey focuses on nonmedical use of prescription drugs by three classes.

So we look at pain medications of the examples we use in the survey are OxyContin, Vicodin and Percodan.

We look at sedatives, asking about Valium, Xanax and Ambien and some stimulants when we look at Ritalin, Adderall and Dexedrine.

But we also examine illicit drug use.

So the College Prescription Drugs Study is typically administered biannually, however there was a slight interruption in 2022 as far as data collection due to the pandemic.

We recognized that many of our partner colleges were really focused on getting services to students in the middle of this national crisis and making sure that our students’ needs were met.

So it didn’t quite make sense to collect data in 2020.

So the 2022 administration is our first look at these data again since 2018.

This year’s study included 15 institutions, and it concluded at the beginning of May.

So we had a couple of implementations.

So schools can select, do they want to collect data in February or April depending on their individual campus schedule.

 

[Audio cuts out] Our institutions are created by email, but any student institution can sign up for free.

So there’s no cost to participate in the survey.

And we do that so practitioners, stakeholders and really anyone invested in your community can use the study to make data driven decisions and strategic plans to reduce prescription drug misuse on your campus.

So there’s no cost to participate and anyone can sign up.

Lucey: Great, and I’m glad you mentioned the pandemic.

I mean we can’t have a conversation lately without talking about the impact that the pandemic has had on various things.

So we might get into that a little bit later.

And forgive me if I missed it.

How is it administered?

 Is it web only?

 Is it available paper/pen?

 Because I just wondered how much of an impact that might have on people responding.

Tessa: That’s a great question.

So this survey is a web-based survey.

We collect data using Qualtrics.

And we do work with the institutions so that email comes from a familiar email address.

So our OSU students get an @osu.edu email address.

So it kind of eliminates some of that concern around phishing or scamming as well.

Lucey: Great.

Well, I’m anxious to get into the findings and talk about what you found and if anything surprised you from previous administrations.

So Emily, I’m going to come to you right off the bat with it.

So one of the key findings from the study focuses on the frequency with which students are misusing prescription drugs, especially stimulants.

So what did the study find in terms of the rates at which college students have ever used a prescription medication for nonmedical reasons?

 And when did these students typically begin to misuse prescription drugs?

Emily: The frequency of drug use and prescription drug misuse on campus is definitely one of the key findings that we’re interested in and just constantly being aware of.

And similar to 2018 administration, students were most likely to report misuse of prescription stimulants.

We see that reported at a rate of 14.5% ever using stimulants for nonmedical reasons in their lifetime.

That’s about double of the other two drug classes that we focus on.

So 7.8% of students reported that for sedatives while 6.8% reported that for pain medications.

So we can see that stimulants really do kind of rise to the forefront of a concern on college campuses.

But that’s lifetime use.

We also examine past year use.

So for students who did report ever having used a prescription drug for a nonmedical reason, the majority had misused, had not misused a prescription drug in the past year, which is good news.

They’re not using most recently.

And that’s true across all of the prescription drugs grouped together as well as separated for pain medication and sedatives.

They had not used in the past 12 months.

We do see a slight majority, about 56% of students who had ever used a prescription stimulant did use in the past 12 months.

So stimulants again kind of need to be brought into the conversation more and more, and that’s what we’ve seen across multiple iterations of this.

Your second question I think is really important because across the board colleges are really high risk in a period for a number of things including prescription drug misuse.

You have students coming in with increased independence for the first time, demands of college life and academics.

So stressors are going to increase the risk.

So we in CPDS just want to understand the initiation of misuse a little bit more and why college is kind of presenting these concerns.

So for stimulants, college is definitely an increased risk for students to begin misusing.

About 63% of students reported ever misusing stimulants, started misusing during undergraduate.

That is quite different than sedatives or pain medications.

For sedatives we see kind of split actually between starting in high school and starting in college.

About 42% in the ’22 administration reported starting misusing sedatives in high school while 43% started in college.

So we have about even there.

And then pain medications have just a slightly different distribution.

People are more likely, the students in our study were more likely to report starting misuse in high school.

So they entered the college atmosphere with potential likelihood of starting before they even got there.

Lucey: So I know that, so as Tessa had mentioned in describing the study at the onset of the interview that there was no administration of the survey in 2020.

So obviously that’s a bit of a gap between 2018 and 2022.

But how did the findings from 2022 differ or maybe are similar from previous administrations?

Emily: I think surprisingly to me we’re seeing decreases in frequency of self-reported lifetime use across all three classes.

So both the pain medications, sedatives and stimulants have been going down steadily from the 2015 administration.

So for example in 2015 we saw stimulants reported about 17.9%.

In 2018 we saw that at 15.9 and now we’re here at 14.5, which all of those things are moving in the right direction.

That’s a useful trend to examine.

But I do want to note that these are very different samples with different regions and institutions represented.

So we try to be cautious with our generalizations of those trends.

But it appears that frequency in lifetime use is going down while other things like initiation of misuse is staying about the same.

They’re staying most likely to start in undergraduate with the stimulant and sedative misuse and high school for pain medication.

Lucey: Tessa, I want to bring you in on kind of a segue to the second question.

According to the 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, many people know that as the NSDUH which is administered through SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse Mental Health Service Administration.

We love our acronyms in government as much as you do at the collegiate level and the community level.

And even when I worked there, you know, and that’s going now back more than six years ago, we saw this same kind of behavior if you will.

So according to the 2020 NSDUH, a little under half of people who misused pain relievers in the past year obtained those pain relievers the last time from a friend or relative.

According to your study, where are students getting the prescription drugs they’re using for nonmedical reasons?

Tessa: Yes, thank you for bringing that up because as Emily was talking I was also thinking about as we look at our data where students are accessing these prescription drugs.

So I think that has a little bit of a role to play in why we’re seeing a slight reduction.

So when we look at the reason that folks are using substances, which is another piece I want to talk on next, but when we look at where folks are accessing them, they’re accessing them from friends and family.

And it’s a little bit different as we look across drug classes, but they are all representative in the majority that they get them from friends or family.

So if we look at sedatives, it’s a little over half get them from friends.

If we look at, if we look at our stimulants, it’s almost 77% of individuals who have misused a stimulant in their life get it from a friend.

And that was their source of accessing it.

And pain meds, excuse me, I misspoke.

It was 44% get it from their friends.

That was our largest group were getting it from their friends.

So I think when Emily is referencing that we’re seeing a slight reduction, now we can see the age old statistics jokes.

Correlation is not causation.

It appears that there may be a relationship with us having less face to face access.

We can’t say that, draw that in conclusion, but it’s entirely possible.

Lucey: And I’m going to guess.

I always want to talk to researchers with guesses because you can actually either confirm or deny, using a government phrase.

So I guess it’s not surprising that among college students their friends or their peers would be kind of a typical source for any of these classes of drugs.

Is that true?

Tessa: Yeah, either their friends or their peers.

I think, you know, I always want to be careful when we’re talking about prevention messaging that it’s not always some nefarious like trying to harm someone else.

Someone could even be trying to be helpful and say I had problems studying for finals too.

I have this prescription.

And here’s my concern.

That’s why we really; we’ll talk about it a little bit later on when we talk about resources to look at.

But we have these wonderful resources that can demonstrate to students how to have those conversations around.

Some things we just don’t share, like our toothbrush.

Just kind of looking at things from that angle.

Lucey: And so I’m not sure how much the study gets into this, but it’s a presumption.

How accessible are prescription drugs for nonmedical use on college campuses?

 I mean I’m going to guess.

We hear this anecdotally from students and from our peers, our professionals, that they know where to go.

They know where to get them.

So really how accessible are they?

Tessa: Yeah, and Emily, I would love for you to jump in if you feel like I’m not going down the right track here or if you would like to add.

But when we [audio cuts out] perceived accessibilities.

Obviously we can’t go from dorm room to dorm room saying, hey, where do you keep your meds?

 But what we do hear from students is when we look at those who say it’s somewhat easy or very easy to get ahold of medications, as we look across drug classes, we can see with stimulants about 26% of students say, yeah, that’s easy or very easy to get ahold of if I needed, if I wanted to access that.

With pain meds it’s about 11% are saying that’s very easy to get.

And with our sedatives we’re seeing about 15% say that’s very easy.

And that’s of everyone.

So it’s not necessarily just the students who have reported misuse in the past.

Lucey: Emily, I’ll give you the opportunity if you want to jump in and add anything there.

Emily: I think there is a lot of factors that really go into understanding the accessibility of these drugs on campuses and understanding just the rates of prescriptions provided to students on campus, how they’re obtained for nonmedical reasons as well as their perception of obtaining any of these drugs.

So I know Tessa just listed out like the ease or that certain students feel towards prescription drugs and how they can access them.

That was asked of all participants in the study.

It was not just the participants who had used at any point.

So even for students not using prescriptions for nonmedical reasons, many still view these drugs as accessible and obtainable on the campus.

So we see them trading between friends, trying to help out, providing information that sometimes increases in this perception and definitely increases the accessibility.

The good news though is that for sedatives and pain medications there’s been a noticeable decrease since the 2018 administration around ease of access, about 5% reduction in both of those.

So that’s good, but stimulants is still staying strong at the ease of access.

Lucey: And I’m glad you mention that because it’s always, it’s always important to have I think the good news also brought in because we also need to.

While we may not be able to take full credit for the decreases, it is, I’ve got to say it’s got to be chalked up to the collective prevention efforts happening on campus, in the communities, with individuals, families, communities, the schools.

So we need to celebrate those even if they’re small wins.

And we can’t have a solid line.

It’s a dotted line if that.

Emily, I'm glad you brought that up.

So thank you for doing that because we do need to really highlight some of those wins.

Tessa, I want to come back to you because you alluded to it earlier, and so I want to delve into it a little bit with this third question.

So according to the study, what are the top reasons college students are using prescription drugs for nonmedical reasons?

Tessa: Thank you.

I think it’s very important to look at the reason that folks are reporting misusing because that really guides our prevention efforts.

And I’m totally with you.

And I just want to call out when we talk about that reduction as far as students reporting this being very easy to access, sometimes we look and we go, oh, it’s a 2% reduction or it’s a 3% reduction.

We have 58,000 students in our sample.

So if we see a 1% reduction, that’s a lot of kids.

So if we would put all of them in an auditorium, that’s a big group of them.

So I just wanted to call that out before we moved on to the reasons.

So the reasons for college students misusing or using prescription drugs for nonmedical reasons stay pretty consistent.

So we’ve seen some slight fluctuation in the percentages, but they’re reasoning has stayed pretty consistent.

So similar to 2018, students were most likely to report misuse of stimulants.

And then when we look at their reasoning for misusing stimulants, it was to improve grades.

So 76% of those students who said that they had ever misused a stimulant prescription in their lifetime were doing so to improve their grade.

That’s their own perception.

So when we look at consequences of use, we can talk about that in a moment.

As we move on to our question about sedatives, so when we ask them why are you misusing a sedative or what’s the attraction, we did see a slight change in that.

And they’re using it to get sleep or to relieve anxiety.

So we’re seeing a slight shift there.

And then when we look at pain meds, the self-reported reason was either to get high or to relieve pain.

Lucey: I have a follow-up on this because this issue of improving grades is something I talk about in the presentations I do.

When we talk about; you both talked about it earlier.

As I have presented, and we know from the various national studies as well as the study we’re talking about right here, among the classes of prescription drugs, typically in the general public it’s typically in order opioids, sedatives, stimulants.

But among college students it will directly invert, and it’s stimulants, sedatives, opioids.

And I would say that’s not to say we don’t have an opioid epidemic or crisis on college campuses because typically you might find it within, say, a sports program.

That’s where student athletes are, right?

 And so we talk about sports injuries and pain management, and so that’s where opioids, the pain relievers, may come into play.

But we talk specifically about this very issue about what you just mentioned, about why students are misusing prescription stimulants.

So if a significant number of students are misusing prescription stimulants because they think it will help them improve their grades, from your perspectives, both of you, what messaging do you advise your peers to be promoting to help prevent that misuse?

Tessa: Absolutely, and I think when we look at heart of the issue around students reporting that misuse, many of those reasons are centered around coping with the unique demands of the college experience.

So if we look; our students are experiencing kind of their first taste of independence.

Some of them are experiencing the financial challenges that college can present as well as just all of the other overwhelming experiences that while they can be wonderful can be stressful to their bodies.

So they’re at an increased risk for mental health concerns, sleep issues, and then there are personal challenges as they navigate this increased independence and the challenges.

So I think any messaging would need to be centered around what those challenges are for your campus.

So I don’t know that there’s a blanket, hey, we can say this to everybody.

We may like a menu to pull from, like, hey, here are some great things.

But I think offering some of those study groups peer support, accessible counseling services, recognizing that some of our colleges particularly are smaller colleges.

There might be a little bit of discomfort in going to that counseling building that is on the other side of campus and everyone knows where I’m going.

So recognizing that we need to make it accessible.

We could have seminars or classroom settings that really provide information on navigating the college experience, just providing that information as a base layer to make sure, hey, we’re all working from the same framework and really work from there.

Lucey: Emily, I’d love to kind of get your thoughts on this as well in terms of the messaging.

Emily: As a counselor, everything Tessa just highlighted about really emphasizing the mental health concerns, the demands of college life and really looking at the reasons why a student might be turning to prescription drugs or any drug to cope I think is the most important factor.

Just looking at the underlying piece of it.

There’s also data that we’ve collected in CPDS that emphasizes when they’re most likely to initiate prescription drug use, misuse for the first time or when they’re more likely to use it again.

And that’s during finals week, before a big project or a deadline coming up.

So messages centered around those just high stress periods of a college student’s life can be potentially more impactful and just emphasizes like a new social norm instead of let’s just cram together and take a prescription stimulant to help us study.

We can challenge that norm during those high stress periods with messaging.

Lucey: And I have some kind of thoughts on this prevention messaging and I’m going to get into it with both of you on our fourth question.

So I won’t steal my own thunder on this particular thought.

But to continue on this particular wavelength though, Tessa, I’ll come back to you and then we can punt it back to Emily.

Is there a point in time as to when you think prevention messaging would be most impactful on college campuses around this issue?

Tessa: Definitely, so I think it two-fold.

So we do see as Emily mentioned, and I’m so grateful Emily jumped in with that because I was going to.

I forgot to mention the timing.

We do know of when students are misusing before finals or before a big exam or a big project, those can be; obviously finals week is kind of set across the university.

It can be slightly different for graduate students, but we kind of have a little season for that.

Those big projects or big exams might be different based on their major.

That can be a little bit of a challenge, an administrator or a university trying to pluck a date.

So I think looking at, as we look at the [audio cuts out].

Students are most likely to use during college, and of those 37% of those students report starting to misuse to study during their freshman year.

So really looking at everything that’s kind of thrown at them during freshman orientation.

But any messaging we can add in during those following weeks or even if there are success classes our freshmen have to take, using those messages there, looking at our dorms and places like that where students are already congregating, to make sure that we get that message in a timely manner.

Lucey: Emily, I guess I come to you.

You mentioned as a counselor, isn’t that also a point in time?

 Granted, it may not be way upstream like in orientation as Tessa mentioned.

But do you see a counseling session obviously as a point in time for that type of messaging to be reinforced?

Emily: Absolutely.

I think a lot of college students just entering this atmosphere for the first time and they’re coming with their own mental health history, their own addiction history within their family, having messages around the tools that are available to them with their independence as they enter that atmosphere is a perfect time for them to get the information before it’s too late and they’re taking a path that feels overwhelming or more difficult to get off of.

Starting fresh at a college campus with clear messaging about the tools that are available to them.

Lucey: Great.

Well, and I’m going to stay with you because I’ll move on to that fourth question.

We’re going to drill into this issue around consequences.

So in addition as Tessa had given us the overview of the study at the top of the interview, so in addition to talking about usage and reasons, the study also gets into consequences.

So what are some of the more frequently reported consequences among students?

Emily: So that’s an important thing to look at as we consider, are they interested in stopping misuse?

 Was continuing the use for them?

 What does the feedback loop look like for students?

 So for both pain medications and sedatives, two of the top three reported consequences are feeling depressed or doing things they wished they hadn’t.

And over a quarter of students who report misusing a pain medication or a sedative report those consequences.

Those are high up on the list.

Consequences for stimulants are a bit different.

As expected we have 62% of college students that reported using a stimulant for nonmedical reasons believe that it had a positive effect on their academics or their grades, which obviously feeds into that loop that we’re talking about.

It increases the desire, potentially maintains students’ reasoning for misusing this prescription drug.

However students also report having emotional or psychological problems or feeling depressed as a direct result of their stimulant misuse.

So these perceived positive effects on their grades sometimes is an academic driver that kind of outweighs some of these other negative effects that they also are reporting.

I think across the board we’re seeing pretty consistently reasons for prescription drug misuse and the consequences of drug use being related to anxiety and/or depression which have consistently been elevated in college students.

So having the intersection of prescription drug misuse and mental health concerns is definitely an area that continues to need to be explored.

Lucey: So I’m going to carry this thought further which I had alluded to in the previous conversation.

So we know that one of the consequences reported by students who misuse prescription stimulants is this perception that it has a positive effect on grades.

Do you know if that is a true positive effect on grades, or is it a perceived positive effect on grades?

Tessa: Yes, and this is kind of one of those myths that hangs around.

Research consistently shows that misusing stimulants; when we say misusing a stimulant, we mean a stimulant that was not prescribed to you.

You only use it for this experience to feel or get high or you’re using it in a way other than a prescriber gave it to you.

So we are not talking about folks who maybe have a diagnosis that warrants use of the stimulant because we know that occasions can be beneficial.

But research has consistently shown that misusing stimulants does not have an effect on student’s academic outcome.

There is no consistent evidence that shows using stimulants to study or improve grades actually results in improved outcomes on either tests, quizzes or [audio cuts out].

Students clearly perceive that it improves their grades, which may be related to the misperceptions or the social norms or the generalization of this outcome.

So there may have been one improved test score along the way, and they’re kind of saying, well, this is why this works for me.

But the research does not back that up.

Lucey: Yeah, I always talk about to the “n” of one, right?

That’s all it takes is that individual to have that one experience and then they think that that was it.

And so now I’ll bring in that thought I had earlier.

So we know that students; I call it misguided belief that the reason students are misusing prescription stimulants is because they believe it’s going to help them get a better grade.

I’m glad that you, Tessa, mentioned that research because on previous episodes of this podcast series I interviewed Dr. Nora Volkow who’s the Director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse.

I interviewed Dr. Amelia Arria out of the University of Maryland College Park.

We talked about this very issue.

I talked about it with both of them, and they both said, yeah, there’s no research to indicate that the nonmedical use of prescription stimulants is going to help you get a better grade.

I’m also glad, Tessa, you referenced what I continue to reinforce.

Yeah, if you have a diagnosed condition, absolutely it will help with concentration and focus.

We’re again talking about the nonmedical use of prescription stimulants.

So what I wanted to come back to was I continue to say I think that that’s a touchpoint for prevention messaging for our peers around the country is to continue driving home that message.

It’s a bit of a social norms misperception campaign of its own.

To continue to try and correct that misperception.

And I’ll get your thoughts, both of you, on that.

Tessa, I’ll start with you.

Tessa: Thank you.

Yeah, I think especially someone who comes from a background in prevention and is fortunate enough to continue to work in prevention and have the opportunity to work on different prevention topics, I think prescription drug misuse prevention is a little more nuanced.

When we look at our needs assessment data, sometimes folks look at prescription rates and our prescription drug monitoring program, and I always say that’s different when we look at underage alcohol sales.

Of course we want that number to go to zero.

If it’s underage alcohol sales, we want to drive it to zero.

When it comes to prescription drug misuse, we want to get rid of the miss.

We want it just to be the folks who need the medication, that it’s serving them and it is really beneficial.

And for those people we want to remind them what you have is beneficial but also potentially dangerous.

We want to encourage you to store it appropriately and dispose of it if you no longer need it.

If you have any other, any issues crop up, of course talk to your healthcare provider about it.

So we don’t want to take them away.

We just want to encourage safety messaging around them.

Lucey: Absolutely.

Emily, I’ll turn it to you.

Emily: I think that’s a similar miss around studying in general that need to be constantly reiterated for college students because I think students are using these stimulants before finals week or before a big deadline, and that kind of indicates this need to cram and memorize.

And we know that that’s not actually the most useful way to learn.

But you do get a positive test score right after.

So even giving them different strategies for long term education and memorization of material rather than the cram and use the resource and the tool even if it’s an unhealthy one like using a stimulant for nonmedical reasons.

Give them other options and alternatives to replace that with.

Otherwise they might feel that they’re in this scramble to get something memorized in their head before the big day.

Lucey: So as we wrap up, I’m going to come now to our final question and give both of you an opportunity to answer this.

And I’m going to focus in on resources.

So according to your study, the majority of students know where to go for help if they’re concerned or worried about prescription drug misuse.

So Tessa, I’ll start with you first.

What resources do you suggest that our listeners use to prevent prescription drug misuse among college students?

Tessa: Absolutely.

We want folks to rely on or lean into those resources that are already created.

My dream is that everyone will use College Prescription Drug Study in their needs assessment or as a planning tool.

We don’t want you to take this data and kind of let it sit on a shelf somewhere.

We want you to use it and look at your trends over time.

So as we looked at resources that are available, after even if you weren’t able to participate in 2022, we would love for you to be here in 2024.

In the meantime you can look at our National Key Finding Survey as kind of an indicator of what could be going on.

And we really wanted to urge everyone to check out campusdrugprevention.gov.

As I was looking at your planning guide, it really resonated with me and particularly as we were conducting a strategic planning on our own campus.

[Audio cuts out] the data so our report will be available.

We also have toolkits from our friends over at SAMHSA, so we have the SAMHSA Behavioral Health among College Students Resource Kit.

So looking just beyond, hey, these kids may be misusing.

Instead let’s go upstream and take a look at why folks are misusing and see how we can promote some of those protective factors.

And then we also have a couple of toolkits or resources that are ready to kind of plug in play for you to take.

So we would just encourage folks to check out Be Med Wise.

It’s a college prevention toolkit for promoting medication safety behaviors.

It works to challenge the norms of prescription drug misuse and things like that as well as Generation RX University.

So this is another free educational interactive toolkit that promotes safe medication practices.

And the college toolkit provides resources for our peer based interactive model.

So it may help kind of alleviate some of those misperceptions around what my peers think is going on or what I think my peers are doing.

Lucey: Those are some absolutely great resources and thank you again for the shout out for campusdrugprevention.gov because we’re very proud of it as well as the Strategic Planning Guide because we know it’s so important for people to be following something like the Strategic Prevention Framework in their efforts.

So Emily, let me turn to you.

Are there any other resources that you would suggest?

Emily: You know, that’s actually such a great question for Tessa because she’s mentoring me in this prevention world.

I’ve been in treatment for so long that I’m stepping into the world of prevention, and there are just tons of resources that I think one of the most useful things for implementing and using CPDS is gathering that for your institution and then using all these resources we just laid out and are available on webpages within the Strategic Prevention Framework.

It has been really cool to see how that evolves and how useful it can be when you have the data ready.

Lucey: That’s such a great reinforcement of that, and I’m glad that Tessa is mentoring you with those resources because it’s exactly what they’re intended for, especially if you’re new to the field.

And I know it’s our publication, but it’s one of the publications I’m most proud of being part of in my career.

And I do say it’s one of those cover to cover reads.

It’s just the Prevention with Purpose Strategic Planning Guide.

If you’re new to the field or not, it really does help to reinforce and guide you.

That’s intended to be, you know, give you those guardrails as we like to say for the journey that you’re on in trying to prevent drug misuse among college students.

So as we wrap up the interview, again thank you, both Tessa and Emily.

I’ve enjoyed having you on this episode of the podcast series.

Some great information out of the study.

We’re really pleased to be able to post it online so people can read about it.

And when it comes time for the next administration, we’re happy to help encourage schools to be a part of that survey collection too.

So keep us in mind for that.

But again, Tessa, Emily, thank you so much for being on this episode.

I really do appreciate it.

Tessa: Thank you so much for having us.

We look forward to seeing that report out there and also are happy to entertain any questions folks have afterwards.

Emily: Thanks so much for having us.

It’s been a pleasure to be able to talk about this on this platform so thanks.

Lucey: Absolutely.

Yeah, it’s been our pleasure.

And I’m sure our listeners are going to get a lot out of it.

And so with that I will thank all of our listeners for tuning into this episode of Prevention Profiles: Take Five.

And with that, have a great day.