Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

Whoa. Here's news from Changing the Court that drug courts are being challenged in Maryland on the basis that they're unconstitutional.

Thanks to Join Together, we've got information about two new grants available from the federal Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT): 

1. Family-Centered Substance Abuse Treatment Grants - These focus on treating adolescents in a holistic way. They are designed to "provide substance-abuse services to adolescents, their families/primary caregivers and older transition-age youth and where appropriate, any significant others/mentors or other appropriate adults." Grantees will be trained in and implement the Adolescent Community Reinforcement Approach (A-CRA) and the Assertive Continuing Care (ACC) protocol. Deadline April 24th.
2. Even more funds are available for the Offender Reentry Program grants, which seek to "expand and/or enhance substance abuse treatment and related recovery and reentry services to sentenced juvenile and adult offenders returning to the community from incarceration for criminal/juvenile offenses." Deadline May 21st.

• New Jersey's Office of the Child Advocate just released a great report on the state's successful detention reform efforts. For a truly compelling graph showing how juvenile arrests in New Jersey kept dropping even as use of detention was reduced, see the new (and interesting in its own right) Policy for Results website, an initiative of the Center for the Study of Social Policy that focuses on "better results for kids and families through research-informed policy."

Think your teen is using drugs? Or maybe you just want help having "the talk" with your children about drugs and alcohol.
Here's two great multi-media websites for parents, sponsored by The Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

• Time to Talk - For parents seeking to prevent drug and alcohol abuse.
• Time to Act - For parents who know (or suspect) their child is already using. It was developed collaboratively with the Treatment Research Institute and includes information on spotting the signs and symptoms of abuse.

Sources: Leadership to Keep Children Alcohol Free and the Center for Substance Abuse Research (CESAR)

Running a juvenile drug court? Interested in adopting the Reclaiming Futures model?
 
Good news: there's $3.675 million available to help you do it, thanks to the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), acting in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 

Ask teens in the justice system what they like to do in their spare time, and one of the most popular answers is usually, "Video games." It can be frustrating for youth workers, who want to see teens out in the real world, interacting with real, positive peers and adults.
But what if we could use video games to help teens practice refusal skills while in treatment? Or to engage them in treatment in the first place? That time may not be far off. 

[As adolescent treatment providers invest in eletronic medical record systems, a natural question arises: how do we integrate our assessment tool into our new record system? Dr. Michael Dennis, creator of the GAIN, has some answers. --Ed.]
This post is a little technical, so here's the bottom line: we will be happy to work with individual treatment providers or with vendors to customize their systems to integrate GAIN data into their electronic medical records. (Scroll to the bottom of this post for contact information.)
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During the past 3 years, Chestnut Health Systems has collaborated with the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) and over 30 agencies to revise the Global Appraisal of Individual Needs (GAIN) instrument and software to allow it to better integrate with the growing number of electronic medical records systems. Several people have asked us to give a brief update on the status of what we have done so far in this area.

• As expected, R. Gil Kerlikowske has been officially named America's "Drug Czar", according to Join Together. While the former Seattle police chief seems to be a good choice, the "drug czar" positoin will no longer be part of the President's Cabinet. Though this might suggest that the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) will have reduced influence on policy, apparently Vice President Joe Biden will also be working on the issue. (See coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post.)

The Federal Advisory Committee on Juvenile Justice (FACJJ) just released its annual report, which sums up its review of state progress with core requirements of the federal Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act.
Among its key recommendations: mandate mental health and substance abuse treatment for youth in the justice system. 
Here's what it says:

Recently, I visited a community where approximately 30-40 adolescents and their caregivers had shown up just to tell me what they thought of an adolescent substance abuse treatment program funded by the agency I represent, the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT). They’d been invited, true, but I was still nervous, since folks tend to show up for town hall meetings and the like only when they have something to complain about.