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from The Partnership at Drugfree.org.
Alcoholics Anonymous is the most effective addiction intervention in history -- in fact, it may well be the most successful self-help program ever. It doesn’t work for everyone, though, and even after more than seven decades and countless studies, researchers still don’t know why the 12 Steps are Gospel for some and nonsense for others. …
A brief advocacy campaign by Umpqua Partners for a Drug-Free Future led to the Borders bookstore chain to move High Times and other marijuana-related publications away from a display of children’s and teen’s books like Twilight, the group said. Umpqua Partners founding partner Marlene Petersen visited a Waldenbooks location -- owned by Borders -- and noticed that publications like High Times and Weed World were displayed right behind the counter and near small backpacks for children and Twilight books intended for teen readers. …
The longtime head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, is stepping down in July, and the leading candidate to replace him reportedly is Yuri Fedotov, currently Russia’s ambassador to the U.K. …
The U.S. Senate has confirmed David K. Mineta as the Deputy Director of Demand Reduction atthe Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), and Benjamin Tucker as the ONDCP?s Deputy Director of State, Local and Tribal Affairs. With the imminent departure of ONDCP deputy director Tom McLellan, Mineta will become the point person for addiction treatment and prevention within the White House agency. …
Faces and Voices of Recovery has published a new guide to "mutual-aid" resources that can help support addiction-recovery organizations. "This one-stop resource is for people in or seeking recovery from addiction, their families and friends and for addiction treatment service providers and other allied service professionals," according to the group. …
How interchangeable are federal agency directors? SAMHSA is about to find out: under a rather surprising work-study initiative, the heads of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) and the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) are about to swap jobs. …
This month’s "Cannabis Cup" in San Francisco featured the unveiling of a product sure to take the debate over e-cigarettes to a new level. Vapor Rush delivers a dose of THC from vaporized marijuana "kief," or powdered resin. Three varieties are offered by the company, based in southern California. "Smoke your green without a lighter, smell, even weed!" the Vapor Rush website boasts. …
Pain doctors have long clashed with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) over opiate-based pain medications, and now Angela Gardner, the head of the American College of Emergency Physicians is warning against making doctors "pain police." Gardner objected to proposals that would require physicans -- including ER docs -- to search a database for patients’ drug-use history before prescribing drugs. Requiring that prescription information be recorded to the database also could discourage some patients from getting proper care, Gardner said. "As an emergency physician, I can assure you that the drug abusers who use the emergency room simply to get a prescription-drug fix represent a micropopulation of the 120-million patients who seek emergency care every year in the USA" ... …
Right after the skeletal Keith Richards, Ozzy Osbourne is the most frequent subject of the question: "How is he still alive?" …
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