We curate a digest of the latest news in our field for advocates, policymakers, community coalitions and all who work toward shaping policies and practices to effectively prevent substance use and treat addiction.
Michelle Durst, a former staffer on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) and more recently the deputy director of government affairs at the American Psychiatric Association, has been named the new Director of Public Policy at the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors (NASADAD).
The Whopper Bar in Miami’s South Beach is exactly what it sounds like -- a place where you can get a beer along with your Burger King sandwich. The new fast-food concept opened in February -- it’s the first BK to sell alcohol in the U.S., though a couple of similar outlets are operating overseas.
How big a problem is addiction in your community? The latest report won’t provide all the answers, but it will give you a snapshot of treatment admissions -- if you live in one of the 27 communities where data was collected.
Hollywood’s current poster child for untreated addiction, actress Lindsay Lohan, has been ordered by a Los Angeles judge to wear an alcohol-monitoring bracelet, attend alcohol education classes, and submit to random weekly drug tests.
No surprise here: report finds wide variances in alcohol, tobacco, other drug use among Asian-Americans ? Hospital admissions for heart attacks would drop by 18,000 if all states banned indoor smoking, AHA estimates ?
Some states may say that marijuana is medicine, but the VA is having none of that: doctors affiliated with the federal veteran’s health program have been barred from recommending medical marijuana to patients ... Meeting with the enemy: the head of the FDA’s new tobacco-regulation agency spoke this week at a conference of Big Tobacco execs ...
The Rhode Island Closing the Addiction Treatment Gap initiative released its report this morning. They asked me to speak at the event. That got me thinking. Why do we have this enormous gap? Why is such a complicated but treatable brain/behavioral disease treated mostly in a separate and unequal system where care is provided almost entirely without physicians by individuals with relatively modest formal training?
Fifteen states enacted increases in cigarette excise taxes in 2009, but three states haven’t raised their cigarette taxes in more than a decade, according to the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland at College Park.
Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) programs are hot right now -- there’s an impressive research base showing they work to cut costs and can nip addiction in the bud. SBIRT also stars in the Obama administration’s new National Drug Control Strategy.
But what about the human side of this somewhat nebulous protocol?
Higher prices and restrictions on advertising will help prevent excessive drinking, World Health Organization says in new policy resolution (too bad it’s non-binding) ? How do you reconcile ’drug-free schools’ with medical-marijuana laws? That’s what school districts in Colorado are trying to figure out ?
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