Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Do too many teens in your juvenile court waive their right to counsel? The Southern Juvenile Defender Center (of the Southern Poverty Law Center) just issued a teen-friendly brochure for Florida teens in juvenile court to convince them not to waive counsel. Best of all: you may be able to have the brochure adapted for your state by contacting Marion Chartoff.  

"Guys like me don't make it."
That's how the arresting introductory video on the Connecticut Turning to Youth and Families (CTYF) website begins. And what the young man means is that no one expected him to make it. But in spite of his own addiction, he found a way through. (July 15, 2009 update: a different video now greets new visitors to the CTYF site. The video pictured above is here.)

Trainings & Conferences

• The Forum for Youth Investment is sponsoring a webinar exploring online communications tools to help youth advocates. It's scheduled for July 8th from 1pm - 2pm EDT.
• "Young People in Recovery, Recovery Schools, and Other Supports," a teleseminar sponsored by Faces & Voices of Recovery, is scheduled for August 18th. It's part of a series for recovery advocates; on July 28th, there'll be another on "The Recovery Bill of Rights: How to Use it in Your Community."
• The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's (OJJDP) conference on enforcing underage drinking laws will be held in Texas August 13-14, 2009.

Suppose you provide alcohol and drug treatment to teens.
What do you do if the mother of an adolescent patient is demanding to see her son’s treatment records, but the son doesn't want your program to discuss his treatment with his mother or to share any records with her?
How do you deal with the relapse of a young teen-age patient? Can your program contact the patient's parents?  Must you?

I just learned about a survey of America's teens conducted last year by an Illinois organization called UCAN that asked them to grade adults on various youth issues.
How'd we do? Not too well. Here's a sampling from our report card:

• A St. Louis family court judge has taken the unusual step of opening his own alternative school for youth in the justice system. The school features lots of oversight and plenty of after-school activities.  
• The families of kids detained in San Francisco won't be charged after all. The city's head of juvenile probation has withdrawn the original proposal to collect fees for detained teens. He stated that only families of youth from outside the city (an estimated 30% of detained youth) would have been charged.

Youth Today tipped me off to an upcoming one-hour webinar on conducting mental health screenings and assessments in the juvenile justice system.
It's sponsored by The Council of State Governments' Justice Center and will be held June 30, from 3pm - 4pm EST. Among other things, the webinar will "showcase '10 steps' that have proven to be necessary for effective implementation of mental health screening in juvenile justice settings."
Follow the links to register.

*Photo copyright Adam Foster | Codefor; reposted under Creative Commons license.

Is drug use among high school-age teens about to soar? Probably, according to an analysis of historical data performed by Carnevale Associates, LLC.
The analysis, which appears in the firm’s policy brief, “Could Youth Drug Use Be Making a Comeback?,” shows that shortly after youth fear and disapproval of marijuana use diminished in the 1990s, teen marijuana use jumped over 30 percentage points between 1992 and 1997. After youth attitudes reversed, teen marijuana use dropped dramatically, falling 29 percent before bottoming out in 2006.

• Remember the two Pennsylvania judges who accepted bribes to detain kids? Now the former co-owner of the detention facilities has pleaded guilty in the case, after previousy maintaining he was the victim of a shakedown.
• A panel at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is considering merging NIAAA and NIDA -- that is, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) -- into a single National Institute on Addiction, generating lots of debate.

Training

• Trying to engage your community? You might be interested in this training on asset-based community development, to be held September 10-12, 2009, in Chicago.

News

• Here's another way of looking at a report we posted about last week from the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA): 95.6% - an estimated $357.4 billion -- of federal and state substance abuse spending in 2005 went to dealing with the costs of addiction, rather than treatment or prevention. Guess what would be cheaper ...