Preventing Drug and Alcohol Use Starts With the World Around Us
Most conversations about substance use focus on the individual. Their choices. Their circumstances. However, a growing area of research is asking a different question entirely. What if the spaces and environments around us are quietly making drug and alcohol use more likely in the first place? New findings from the University of Calgary suggest that preventing drug and alcohol use requires us to look beyond personal decisions and examine the spaces people move through every day. The numbers, moreover, are hard to ignore.
One in Four Students: A Drug and Alcohol Prevention Crisis on Campus
More than one in four university students are affected by substance use or addiction-related challenges. That figure comes from ongoing research across 27 post-secondary institutions in Alberta. It points to something far larger than a handful of individuals making poor choices.
“This is a health issue that affects over one in four students. It is not a niche issue,” says Dr Victoria Burns, founder and director of Recovering on Campus (ROC).
When a quarter of any population faces the same problem, the environment they share deserves serious scrutiny. Substance use does not emerge in isolation. It grows in conditions. Therefore, understanding those conditions is the essential first step toward changing them.
How Everyday Environments Work Against Drug and Alcohol Prevention
Dr Burns identifies a set of environmental pressures that most people will recognise. Campus events where alcohol takes centre stage. Workplace cultures built around after-work drinking. Social norms that treat substance use as a rite of passage. As a result, abstinence can feel awkward or even socially costly.
These are not dramatic influences. They are quiet, ambient ones. They accumulate over time and shape behaviour in ways that rarely feel like pressure in the moment.
Her research, published in two peer-reviewed articles, examines how environments and social systems either protect people or expose them to greater risk. The core insight is important. Drug and alcohol prevention cannot rely on individual resolve alone when the surrounding environment works against it. In other words, the spaces and cultures people inhabit need to change as well.
The Architecture of Drug and Alcohol Prevention
Nooshin Esmaeili is an architect, PhD candidate and sessional instructor at the University of Calgary. She studies how physical spaces affect human wellbeing and behaviour. Her research draws on environmental psychology and neuroaesthetics. She wants to understand why some spaces make people feel safe and grounded, while others generate stress and disconnection.
“Human beings don’t just occupy space, we absorb it,” Esmaeili says. “Place can stabilise or destabilise someone’s sense of self.”
Her findings carry clear implications for drug and alcohol prevention. Spaces with natural light, access to green areas and welcoming layouts tend to reduce stress and build community. These are precisely the conditions linked to lower rates of substance use. Chronic stress and social isolation, on the other hand, are among the most well-established risk factors for developing a problematic relationship with alcohol and drugs.
Furthermore, the design of a building is never truly neutral. It either supports or quietly undermines the conditions that protect people from substance use.
Peer Visibility as a Tool for Preventing Drug and Alcohol Use
One of the clearest lessons from UCalgary’s research is that visible, substance-free community acts as a powerful preventive force. When people see others openly choosing not to drink or use substances, it challenges the assumption that everyone is doing it.
“The more people that are out and visible, the more likely others are to seek help or feel less isolated,” says Burns. Additionally, addiction thrives on isolation, and isolation is partly a product of environments that leave people with nowhere else to go.
Consequently, UCalgary’s Recovering on Campus programme offers substance-free events, peer networks and genuine social alternatives. These are not token gestures. They are structural changes that shift what feels normal. What feels normal, in turn, is one of the most powerful forces shaping human behaviour.
The programme now runs across 27 post-secondary institutions. That scale reflects both the urgency and the practical reach of this prevention-through-environment approach.
What Needs to Change for Real Drug and Alcohol Prevention
The research from Calgary points to clear priorities for anyone serious about drug and alcohol prevention in young people and wider communities.
Social spaces need substance-free options that are genuinely appealing. Institutions need to examine the ways their own cultures quietly normalise drinking. Built environments need natural light, warmth and human-centred design. These qualities reduce the stress and disconnection that drive substance use.
“I think what we’re doing at the University of Calgary is a smaller scale for a recovery-friendly city,” says Esmaeili. The same thinking applies equally to a prevention-friendly workplace or a prevention-friendly school.
Preventing drug and alcohol use has always required collective effort. Yet what this research makes plain is that community is not just a group of people. It is also the spaces those people share. The question worth asking now is whether those spaces are built to protect people or to leave them exposed.
(Source: WRD News)