The potential spillover effects of the United States' opioid epidemic on children's educational outcomes have received surprisingly little attention from researchers. Accordingly, this study leverages national datasets of county-level opioid prescription rates and public school students' third- to eighth-grade academic achievement to provide the…

The 2013 North Carolina Youth Risk Behavior Survey (NCYRBS) was developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and adapted by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) to monitor health-risk behaviors and to measure progress toward achieving Healthy North Carolina 2020 objectives. The survey, administered in…

This paper examines a high school drug education text using critical discourse analysis (CDA) to discern its underlying ideological commitments and political dispositions. I begin with an overview of CDA and why it is a suitable methodology for my work, and then provide a brief history of drug education in North America. Next, I consider some of…

The use of illicit and licit drugs continues to be a major public health concern. Many prevention and drug education programs address this issue by attempting to enhance self-esteem. The idea is that increased levels of self-esteem will serve as a protective factor in decreasing the motivation and increasing the resistance to use drugs. This study…