ASAP offers 'Prime-For-Life' program

By J.M. Miller, Army Substance Abuse Program, Directorate of Human Resources, U.S. Army Garrison-HawaiiDecember 1, 2015

ASAP offers 'Prime-For-Life' program
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Happy Holidays. It's that time of year again when some Soldiers engage in high-risk behavior. It's also a good time to make a change.

Some say that change is the hardest thing for a person to do; however, the Army Substance Abuse Program, or ASAP, strives to make that an easy process after you make the choice.

You just have to make the choice to Take a Stand!

One of the classes offered at ASAP is called Prime-For-Life. It's a motivational prevention, intervention and pretreatment program specifically designed for people who may be making high-risk choices.

This includes, but is not limited to, impaired driving offenders, military members and people charged with alcohol and/or drug related offenses. It's designed to change drinking and drug use behaviors by changing beliefs, attitudes, risk perceptions, motivations and the knowledge of how to reduce their risk of alcohol and drug-related problems throughout their lives.

Because Prime-For-Life includes both prevention and intervention content, it is also designed in a way that serves universal, selective and indicated audiences with program delivery options for each.

Universal audiences are those without any known increased risk factors who may only need the risk reduction information provided in the prevention component. Some examples of potential universal audiences are all incoming military members, freshman at a university or employees at a company that wants to provide preventative programming to its personnel.

Selective audiences are those who may have signs of increased risk for developing problems, such as military members who are exhibiting responsibility issues or lack of discipline, youth with truancy issues or family members of individuals with substance use problems.

Indicated groups are those already making high-risk alcohol or drug choices (already received an OVUII or a positive urinalysis result) and who may be exhibiting signs of problems. Such individuals benefit from a more intensive version of Prime-For-Life and may even participate in it as a pretreatment program.