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Volume 27, Issue 3 | Winter 2007/2008
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In this issue:
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AADAC website Contact us |
Insights From the Conference: IOS 2007In the final week of November 2007, nearly a thousand people from across Canada—including more than 400 addiction professionals from Alberta—met in Edmonton for the national Issues of Substance (IOS) addictions conference. The conference's theme, "Shaping the Future," turned out to be a better choice than even the organizers could have anticipated. |
Notes From the Future? Dr. Mark Kleiman's Policy of PragmatismEliminate the minimum drinking age. Force drug-involved criminal offenders to quit using. Stop trying to put all drug pushers in jail and concentrate on the nastiest ones only. Revoke some people’s drinking privileges. Save aggressive mass crackdowns for newly emerging drugs and just do damage control on the drugs that are too popular to eliminate from the market. Question the value of prevention efforts. Expand opioid replacement therapy. Get more people to quit on their own. It’s hard to categorize Mark Kleiman’s ideas for limiting the damage done by drug abuse. Some sound like they would fit right in with a get-tough enforcement stance. Others sound both compassionate and pragmatic. All of them seek to use the least public resources to achieve the greatest public benefit. All of them are based on the evidence gathered in the long U.S. war on drugs. The opening keynote speaker at the Issues of Substance 2007 conference and director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at the UCLA School of Public Affairs, Dr. Kleiman challenged the preconceptions of the audience, no matter what their own views were. Street Research: Reaching At-Risk Youth Where They LiveStreet-involved youth are at high risk for a number of health and social problems. Unfortunately, the same factors that put them at risk also make them one of the hardest groups for health service providers and researchers to reach. But as Dr. David Patton's presentation at Issues of Substance 2007 showed, researchers are meeting this challenge by working with front-line service providers to learn more about the lives these marginalized youth lead, and the challenges they face. Whose Ideology Is It Anyway? A Group DiscussionOn the final morning of IOS 2007, two "Shaping the Future" discussion sessions took place that weren't listed on the conference program. The session topics had been chosen during the conference, based on what participants were most interested in talking about. One of the topics they chose, "Balancing Ideology and Evidence in Federal and Provincial Policy Development," was an issue that had been on many participants' minds throughout the conference. The session gave them a chance to engage in a wide-ranging conversation about how helping professionals relate to governments, to the public, and to each other. The Back PageOn The Back Page of Developments you can read about conferences, learning opportunities, special events and recommended AADAC resources (always good and sometimes extraordinary value). If you want to advertise on The Back Page, contact Developments for rates and deadlines. |
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