I asked my guest a question I've never been able to answer well myself. If you're standing on the sidelines at a youth soccer game and somebody turns to you and asks what substance use prevention actually is, what do you say in 90 seconds?

Rear Admiral Christopher Jones, director of SAMHSA's Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, didn't flinch. I'm still thinking about his answer three days later.

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This episode is about a shift I've been watching happen across the prevention field for years, and finally heard someone at the federal level name out loud. We keep building programs. One for alcohol. One for vaping. One for opioids, because that's where the funding stream points this year. Chris told me flatly that this is the wrong frame. The risk and protective factors underneath substance use don't care which drug you're worried about. A kid with an unstable home, an anxious nervous system, and no adult consistently showing up for them is at risk for all of it, not just the one your grant is scoped to.

So the non-negotiable, as he put it, is simple to say and hard to live: don't chase a single substance.

"Don't chase a single substance."

That line stopped me. Because I've sat in plenty of planning meetings where the whole conversation gets organized around whatever substance made the news last month. Chris's argument is that the communities doing this well have stopped asking "which drug" and started asking a different question entirely. What are the conditions in this school, this home, this neighborhood, that make any kind of substance use more or less likely? Strong school connection. Supportive adults. Economic stability. Even things you wouldn't expect, like how generous a state's SNAP benefits program is. He walked me through research tying that one to reduced population-level substance use, and I had to sit with that for a minute.

This matters right now because so many of us are working inside funding structures that push us toward single-substance thinking even when we know better. Coalition leaders feel this tension constantly: write the grant to the substance that's funded, build the coalition around the conditions that actually work. Chris isn't pretending that tension doesn't exist. He's naming it, and then handing you a better way to think about the work underneath it.

We also got into something I don't talk about publicly very often: how the "22 die a day" style messaging aimed at veterans actually deepened my own shame instead of pulling me toward help when I was struggling. That part of the conversation changed how I think about every piece of content I put out from here forward.

If you lead a coalition, sit on a prevention team, or just care about where this field is headed in 2026, I think you'll want the full conversation. Chris doesn't give easy answers. He gives better questions.

🎧 Listen to the full episode: