In many foreign countries, “Normative Education” is taken notice as an effective educational strategy for the prevention and control of drug abuse including drinking and smoking among adolescents. “Normative Education” focuses on the social factors, especially “peer influence”, that affects a behavior, and attempts to reduce such influence. This article aims at acquiring a fundamental document in order to introduce the Normative Education to the Japanese drug education. To this end, we reviewed the theories, methods and effectiveness of Normative Education. A review of literature showed that Normative Education is an effective educational strategy on various intervention populations such as junior high school students, college students and adults, and on various intervention purposes such as drinking, smoking and drug abuse prevention. In addition, it was shown that the main method of Normative Education is to give the information about accurate norm in the community, which is simple and easy for application. Furthermore, the effectiveness of Normative Education does not depend on the education mediums such as education in class, personal interview, and mailed pamphlet. These results indicate that the Normative Education is likely to be applicable to Japanese drug education, which will result in the similar positive effects, from the viewpoint of its generality, effectiveness, and handiness.
