In 1992, Iceland had all its 14, 15, and 16-year-olds fill out a survey about their experience with drugs and alcohol. 25% smoked daily, and over 40% had gotten drunk in the past month. Since then, Iceland has implemented a kind of radical common sense, and the problem has been all but solved.

Writing for Mosaic, Emma Young details the changes:

Today, Iceland tops the European table for the cleanest-living teens. The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42% in 1998 to 5% in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17% to 7%. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23% to just 3%.

To achieve this amazing rescue of the nation’s youth, Iceland hired U.S. psychology professor Harvey Milkman, whose research in New York and later Denver suggested that drugs and alcohol are people’s ways of dealing with stress. Milkman discovered that people choose uppers or downers depending on how they prefer to cope. Booze and heroin numb the user; speed, cocaine, and other stimulants let people confront their problems.

But Milkman wondered why people start, and then continue, taking drugs. “That’s when I had my version of the ‘aha’ experience,” he told Young in Mosaic. “They could be on the threshold for abuse before they even took the drug, because it was their style of coping that they were abusing.”

[Photo: Three Lions/Getty Images]

Milkman went on to found Project Self-Discovery in Denver, an initiative to give kids alternatives to drugs and crime. “The main principle was that drug education doesn’t work because nobody pays attention to it,” Milkman said in Mosaic. So instead, he gave them something better to do. Kids could choose to learn music, dance, hip hop, art, and martial arts; the program also taught them life skills. It was a success. Soon after, Milkman was invited to Iceland to discuss the work, and now he lives there.

This is when the first drug-and-alcohol-use survey was taken, and the surveys are still conducted every year, to keep the data fresh. To curb Iceland’s drug-abusing, booze-swilling youth, simple measures were implemented under a plan called Youth In Iceland. Alcohol sales were banned for anyone under 20, and the age limit for tobacco was set at 18. Kids aged 13 to 16 were placed under 10 p.m. curfew in winter; midnight in summer. Also, each local district now comes up with communal pledge, which parents sign. “For kids aged 13 and up, parents can pledge to follow all the recommendations,” Young wrote, “and also, for example, not to allow their kids to have unsupervised parties, not to buy alcohol for minors, and to keep an eye on the wellbeing of other children.” Parents also patrol their neighborhoods to keep an eye on the local kids’ behavior.

At the same time, parents are encouraged to spend more time with their kids, and kids are directed do out-of-school activities. In Reykjavik, families get a Leisure Card which gives each child $300 a year to spend on activities.