"As our experience with drug education has developed and been charted, it has become apparent that effective efforts need to be comprehensive. A classroom teacher's efforts must be reinforced by school wide drug abuse prevention activities, and these must in turn be supported by interventions in all aspects of community life. Furthermore, it is not enough merely to address the surface issue of drug use behavior; we must also address the environmental circumstances that contribute to such problems. This complex issue presents a great challenge to drug educators, but it also calls for a restructuring, sometimes called a paradigm shift, of many of our social institutions and the way they interact. For example, faith-based organizations are generally uninvolved in drug abuse prevention, except to condemn drug abuse. For them to have an organized and planned role in prevention will require a shift in their thinking about their goals and what type of programs they should sponsor. Establishing referral networks, service linkages, and collaborative relationships among community agencies and individuals is a difficult hurdle. Whether or not this is done, drug education professionals often do not know the long-term results of their work because the outcome occurs in the future, when educators no longer have contact with the objects of their efforts. Satisfaction may come from reviewing data trends as the years unfold, but this is not as gratifying as the immediate results that may come from participating in drug treatment of other kinds of human service work in which success is more immediately apparent. Of course, the flip side is that failure also is not recognized. Prevention efforts are repeated because they are well received or because of the inherent satisfaction of doing them. The fact that they have no impact may not be realized without careful evaluation. There has been a new push by the U.S. government to demand that state and local prevention programs, wen funded by state and federal dollars, be "science based." The expectation is that programs should show some evidence, prior to implementation, that they will actually affect youth drug use. The background to this effort is that enthusiasm and genuine concern for preventing adolescent drug abuse have often been translated into activities that are enjoyable but not carefully examined and tested. Schools have used funds to purchase t-shirts and ribbons, hire expensive motivational speakers, and to acquire videotapes and untested curriculum material without any assurance that such expenditures have led in the past, or will lead in the future, to decreases in youth drug use."