2009 POPAI Elections

Submitted by Linda Brady
Title: Vice-President
June 9, 2009

Dear POPAI Members:

It is time for the annual POPAI Elections.

Up for election in 2009:
District 1
District 3
District 5
District 7
Vice-President
Treasurer

POPAI District 8 Representative, Warren Hale, is serving as the Election Committee Chair.

The Intent to Run form may be found on the POPAI web site. It must be sent to Warren by July 3rd (postmarked, emailed or faxed).

By August 3rd, Warren will send out the election slate to the POPAI membership.

The election will be held during our POPAI Fall Conference (September 9th, 10th, and 11th). Watch the POPAI web site for more details.

Hope to see you all at the Fall conference!

Thanks.

Linda Brady
POPAI Vice-President

HBO Understanding Addiction Web Site

Submitted by Linda Brady
Title: Vice-President
June 23, 2009

WHAT IS ADDICTION?

Addiction is a chronic but treatable brain disorder in which people lose the ability to control their need for alcohol or other drugs.

Visit this informative web site hosted by HBO. There is a wealth of information and videos helpful for substance abuse practitioners, addicts and the general public.

Bill Would Bar Sex Offenders From Facebook and MySpace

Submitted by Melonie Coan
Title: District 2 Rep
June 16, 2009

Bill Would Bar Sex Offenders From Facebook and MySpace
Published: January 30, 2008

ALBANY — Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo and state lawmakers, with the backing of the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook, are pushing a bill that would crack down on sex offenders’ use of the sites.

The law would require all registered sex offenders to submit any e-mail addresses and other Internet identifiers, such as screen names used for instant messaging, to the State Division of Criminal Justice Services within 10 days of their creation, just as with their home addresses.

Offenders who fail to do so would be violating their parole or probation, Mr. Cuomo said.

Under the bill, Level 3 sex offenders, whom the state considers the most dangerous and most likely to commit another sex crime, and sex offenders who used the Internet to commit sex crimes or who committed crimes against minors would be barred from social networking sites. Such offenders would also be barred from communicating online with children.

Lower-level sex offenders and sex offenders who did not use the Internet in their crimes would not be barred from the sites under the bill. MySpace and Facebook said, however, they would bar them anyway.

The bill also would allow the state to share the e-mail addresses with sites like Facebook and MySpace. Officials with both companies have agreed to check their databases against the lists provided by the state. If the addresses match, the companies said that they would terminate the users’ accounts and alert the authorities. When setting up accounts with the sites, users must submit valid e-mail addresses.

Mr. Cuomo, along with the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and other lawmakers, unveiled the bill on Tuesday. “This will take us to the next level,” said Mr. Cuomo, who applauded the bipartisan support for the bill. “It’s not just a conceptual agreement we have. There is a specific bill that is written.”

“We have to admit that life is different than when we were growing up,” said Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, a Democrat from Brooklyn and a supporter of the bill. “We avoid letting our children go to the playground now. We avoid the opportunity for them to walk to school alone and not have some protection, or go to the mall alone. Yet our children are as much at risk in our own homes as they are anywhere — on our computers.”

Mr. Cuomo said that he did not believe that the bill, in tracking sex offenders and possibly restricting their Internet access, would violate their rights.

In May, MySpace implemented a program to find the profiles of any registered sex offenders on the site and remove them, said Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer for the company.

At U.S. Colleges, Binge Drinking Is on the Rise

Submitted by Joe Hooker
Title: District 6 Rep
June 16, 2009

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Delicious Digg Facebook Fark Newsvine Reddit StumbleUpon Technorati Yahoo! Bookmarks Print By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter by Steven Reinberg
healthday Reporter – Mon Jun 15, 7:03 pm ET
MONDAY, June 15 (HealthDay News) -- Binge drinking among American college students is on the rise, along with its consequences of drunk driving and drinking-related deaths, U.S. health officials report.


In fact, drinking-related deaths among students aged 18 to 24 years have increased steadily from 1,440 a year in 1998 to 1,825 in 2005, according to a report from the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Binge drinking also increased during this time, with the proportion of students who said they'd binged on alcohol in the past month going up from 42 to 45 percent.


The proportion of students who admitted to driving under the influence of alcohol rose from about 26 to 29 percent, according to the report.


"Unfortunately, what we see is the proportions of college students who engage in binge drinking has increased," said lead researcher Ralph Hingson, director of the institute's division of epidemiology and prevention research.


"There's a whole culture that needs to be changed around drinking and driving under the influence among young people in the United States," he said. Adding to the problem is that alcohol is cheap and many alcohol beverage makers target high school and college students, Hingson said.


Often the problem begins before college. "The younger people are when they first become intoxicated," he said, "the greater the likelihood that when they are in college they will meet alcohol-dependence criteria: that they will drive after drinking; that they will ride with drinking drivers; they will be injured under the influence of alcohol; or they will have unplanned and unprotected sex after drinking."


To reach their conclusions, Hingson's team used information from government databases and national surveys on alcohol use. Their report appears in a supplement to the July issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.


Not only are the people who binge drink putting themselves at risk, but their drinking can have serious consequences for others, Hingson said.


"We estimate there are probably 700,000 students who are assaulted each year by a drinking college student and 100,000 sexual assaults that are linked to college drinking," he said. "Plus half of the drinking-related traffic deaths among college students are people other than the drinking driver."


Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said that to reverse the trends, society needs to take drinking among college students more seriously.


"Options for bad judgment available to a college student are determined by society, and ours is decidedly ambivalent about alcohol," Katz said. "Drinking to excess is often given favorable treatment in the media, and in social groups."


To change these trends, young people drinking to excess will need to be discouraged by the very people whose opinions matter most to them -- friends in their own peer group, Katz said.


"For this to occur, our society must both render and convey a clearer verdict opposing this casual form of alcohol abuse," he said.


Hingson said that a number of interventions have been shown to work, including counseling high-risk drinkers, raising the price of alcohol, and getting colleges, community health departments and police to work together on the problem.


Yet some college presidents think there should be a debate about lowering the drinking age, Hingson noted. "But, when we look at the data, binge drinking and driving is mostly among 21- to 24-year-olds," he said. "It's not among the 18- to 20-year-old group," he said.


"It appears to me that some colleges are not implementing the interventions, where we've got evidence that they work," Hingson said. "The challenge for us is to make sure colleges understand what things are working. We have to get them to expand screening and interventions to reach wider populations of students and work with communities."


Dr. Marc Galanter, director of the division of alcoholism and drug abuse in the psychiatry department at the New York University School of Medicine, said that binge drinking among college students has far-reaching effects for the students.


"The heavy drinking during college not only results in severe consequences at that time, [but] it also primes college students for later alcohol addiction," Galanter said. "Heavier drink at this age is a predictor of later alcoholism and is likely a major causative factor."

And Hingson said that efforts akin to what has been done to reduce smoking are needed to deal with the drinking problem among young people.

"We as a society have a collective responsibility to try and change this culture of drinking at colleges and among young people," he said.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on alcohol consumption.