Priority One

The Miami Coalition For A Safe And Drug-Free Community has adopted the reduction of youthful substance abuse as its primary mission for the Coalition’s second decade. That vision has been formulated into a series of Impact, Strategy, and Program Objectives presented here. For each of these objectives, local performance measures of effectiveness have been developed as community prevention outcome projections. These performance measures provide quantitative tools which will assist the community in tracking its progress and ultimately in achieving its goal to cut the rate of youthful substance abuse in half.

The objectives for Priority One contained herein are targeted at the factors that place Miami-Dade County youth at risk for substance abuse and for which local measurable indicators are available. These factors are based on the key determinants of substance abuse as identified by the National Institute on Drug Abuse¹, the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s 1998 National Drug Control Strategy, and local epidemiological findings. The objectives and outcome projections have been formulated by The Miami Coalition’s Research and Information Center.