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  Columbia University
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NOTE: as of April 17, 2007, the Free to Grow program has closed.
Research & Policy

Community action guide to policies for prevention
Join Together Policy Panel on Preventing Substance Abuse

This guide offers key steps and strategies for implementing the recommendations of the Join Together Policy Panel on Preventing Substance Abuse, and lists helpful organizations and available resources. Brief vignettes of communities and residents working together to prevent substance abuse where they live illustrate how each strategy can be implemented. A companion document, Alcohol and drug abuse in America: Policies for prevention, describes in more detail the major recommendations: an intergovernmental policy to support and fund community-based prevention efforts; official encouragement of local prevention initiatives sponsored by community institutions, groups, and parents; enacting laws that minimize violence related to ATOD use and illegal access to ATOD; public airing of appropriate information; and increasing prevention program accountability and evaluation.

Steps to mobilize federal, state, and local policy against ATOD use include convening key government and community leaders, collaborating with federal and state legislators, pooling resources, assessing priorities, gathering community support, and ensuring full community participation. Coalitions can get strong official public support by prioritizing needs, working with other groups, and using the media to highlight prevention efforts. Programs should be targeted to groups throughout the community: families, schools and youth, the workplace, the criminal justice system, the media and entertainment industry, the religious community, the recreation and health care systems, community and civic organizations, and public housing. (Join Together regularly surveys over 1,000 community coalitions fighting drugs. The most recent survey is summarized in the Join Together report: Leading from the ground up, described in Section II above.) Violence reduction steps include surveying the relevance of present laws and enforcement, setting higher legal standards, and instituting school conflict resolution programs. Illegal access to ATOD can be stemmed by working with local and state legislators to fill legal loopholes and change weak laws, increase law enforcement budgets, and change tax rates and licensing processes for alcohol and tobacco sales. Information dissemination can be improved by sharing information and training among ATOD prevention agencies and community groups, and by establishing personal contacts for mailings on publications and projects pertinent to the local community. Technical assistance from federal and state agencies can improve evaluation and accountability, as well as learning how to use local indicator data, sharing evaluation tools with other prevention programs, confirming the role of evaluation in successful programs, and linking with local or regional universities to become part of public or private research projects.

A separate report: Fixing a failing system, contains six recommendations made by a policy panel of criminal justice experts. It provides program descriptions, and technical and financial resources to help neighborhood activists, residents, employees and employers, and institutions in communities work with the criminal justice system to reduce substance abuse.

Join Together
School of Public Health
Boston University
441 Stuart Street
6th Floor
Boston, MA 02116
(617) 437-1500
Fax: (617) 437-9394
e-mail: shelley@jointogether.org
(1994, 48 pp.; free; Alcohol and drug abuse in America: Policies for prevention, 1994, 32 pp., free; Fixing a failing system, national policy recommendations: How the criminal justice system should work with communities to reduce substance abuse, 1996, 37 pp., free)





 

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Free To Grow is a national program supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with direction and technical assistance provided by the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University.