Overview
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs (ATOD) was a designation that emerged in the 1980s to capture emerging trends in neuroscientific studies that showed alcohol, nicotine, and other substances shared biological mechanisms that impacted the brain’s reward system. In 1985, the American Public Health Association (APHA) officially created an Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs Section that repeated terms like “chemical dependency” and “substance abuse.” The phrase was intentionally crafted to explicitly categorize alcohol and tobacco as drugs and tackle the assumption that legal and illicit substances were inherently different.
In 1989, the United States Congress passed The Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act (DFSCA) which requires all educational institutions receiving federal funding to create prevention programs for substance use. One vendor for these Drug and Alcohol Abuse Prevention Programs (DAAPPs) was D.A.R.E, or Drug Abuse Resistance Education. D.A.R.E. adopted the ATOD framework guide three categories of responses, usually through an umbrella narrative that alcohol and tobacco were “gateway drugs” to illicit substances.