Investigating the Youth Participation in Drugs and Psychotropic Substance Prevention and Its Related Psycho-Social Factors

Although, the police are the main responsible for the prevention of drugs and psychotropic substance, due to the complexity and prevalence of this phenomenon, efforts are being made to use the capacities of the society like the youth to prevent this social pathology. This survey has investigated the youth participation in the prevention of the drugs and psychotropic substance and to examine its relationship with responsibility, police performance, awareness from the drugs consequences, problem solving skill, and some demographic variables. Population is the youth aged 18 to 30 in Yasouj, Gachsaran, and Dehdasht, that 332 cases were selected using the multi-stage random sampling method. Research instruments for measuring the participation in the prevention of the drugs, responsibility, police performance, and awareness from the drugs consequences are the researcher-made questionnaires, that their validity and reliability were assessed using the content validity and the Cronbach’s coefficient respectively. Furthermore, to measure the problem solving skill, the questionnaire prepared by D’Zurilla et al (2002) was employed. The descriptive findings showed that, the youth participation in the prevention of the drugs and psychotropic substance is on average and in particular, in the formal dimension (interaction & cooperation with police) is low. In addition, the analytical findings revealed that there is a significant relationship between police performance, awareness from the drugs consequences, problem solving skill, and the residency in Gachsaran, and the youth participation in the prevention of the drugs. The above-mentioned variables explain .206 of the variance of the dependent variable.