Throughout our three decades of work, Drug Strategies has always been driven by two words: Rethink Everything. Our innovative, comprehensive approach to addressing the nation’s drug crisis will be leveraged by future generations.. 

A Legacy of Action

From the start, Drug Strategies eschewed the status quo, which clearly was not working to reduce drug addiction. It was also harming millions of drug users who could not get treatment and ended up in prisons and jails. Convincing policymakers that supply reduction — through interdiction, enforcement and incarceration — wasn’t an effective approach was an uphill battle.

But convincing those at the top was only one piece of the puzzle. We needed their constituents—those directly impacted by the drug epidemic—to understand federal drug policy and the need for effective programs. That way they, too, could advocate for increased funding of prevention and treatment approaches that reduced actual demand for drugs.

The nation’s long “war on drugs” was a highly polarized, politicized topic, but we understood that drug abuse destroyed families across America—regardless of political parties—and that people urgently needed help. That’s why Drug Strategies remained outspoken in pursuing more effective policies. 

A Legacy of Innovation

The Federal Government’s guidance around drug prevention and treatment programs was inadequate, riddled with information gaps, frustrating families who needed to know exactly what to do and who to trust in such a vulnerable moment. When it became clear that families could not readily access information on how to help their loved ones, we went about identifying ways to empower them directly. 

Leveraging every channel available—from broadcast news, to printed materials, to online games in English and Spanish—Drug Strategies put actionable information in the hands of those who needed it most. This became especially powerful as the Internet gained traction. We experimented early with the opportunity to connect parents and especially teens with information directly and discreetly. 

As ubiquitous as it is today, the direct-to-consumer model of information dissemination was truly an innovation at the time, empowering individuals by giving them the guidance they needed to get support. 

A Legacy of Impact

Through our vision and our pursuit of innovation, Drug Strategies made a lasting impact: 

We provided tools to parents, teachers and schools to help them assess for themselves the relative effectiveness of prevention programs;

We created guides to adolescent drug treatment so that parents and other concerned adults would know the key elements in effective teen treatment programs and what questions they should ask before choosing a program;

We also created guides to drug treatment in the juvenile justice system, so that judges, social workers, and other officials could make informed choices about treatment; 

We analyzed federal and state drug budgets so that government spending would be more transparent and easily understood by the public; we also assessed the impact of government spending so that people could judge for themselves what they were getting for their tax dollars.