Director's Corner

Director's Update

Kimberly A. Johnson, Director

What's New - 8/1/02 update:

In the coming months we'll have a lot to say about the State Incentive Grant -- One ME. This grant will allow the Office of Substance Abuse to work with our community partners to provide proven substance abuse prevention programs to youth ages 12-17, the ages when they are most at risk of beginning drug and alcohol use.

We have applied for funding to work with law enforcement in five Maine counties to support their efforts to enforce underage drinking laws. Assuming we receive the funding from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, this effort will begin this fall in Cumberland, Lincoln, Piscataquis, Somerset, and York counties. The training developed for law enforcement agencies through this grant will be opened up to participation from other counties as space allows.

We are working with the state university system to develop a system wide approach to combat binge drinking on campuses through the Higher Education Alcohol Prevention Project. Binge drinking creates serious safety hazards for all students on campus as it is related to many injuries, assaults (both physical and sexual), and a poor learning environment. As this project moves forward, we will post more information.

The work we have done over the past two years to create a treatment system that is welcoming to people with co-occurring mental illness and substance abuse will move into implementation as we have local systems and individual agencies change their practices to better treat the 30% of clients that have both types of illnesses.

We have issued a number of Requests for Proposals that will result in new and improved treatment services in the coming year. We awarded funding to the Passamaquody Tribe to provide treatment at the Pleasant Point reservation which has been devastated by both alcohol and prescription opiate abuse.

We will be working with the Phoenix House to develop short-term residential treatment for adolescents as young as 14. With the increase in use of prescription opiates, and now heroin, we are seeing a younger onset of serious substance abuse and addiction, and an increased need for treatment for young people.

One of our goals is to work with the rest of the Department of Behavioral & Developmental Services, the Department of Human Services and the Maine State Housing Authority to eliminate chronic homelessness. Many people who live in shelters or on the streets have serious substance abuse problems as well as chronic mental illness and of course poverty. We will be directing efforts toward providing services that address these people's serious and multiple problems.

In the coming years we are going to have to begin to look at the aging of the population, and how that affects the fields of substance abuse prevention and treatment. While our current view of prevention focuses on children and adolescents, we are going to need to take a more lifelong approach. Particularly as baby boomers age, their ability to metabolize alcohol is reduced putting them at risk for a number of physical problems, including late onset addiction.

Technology has not greatly increased productivity in healthcare the way it has in other fields. While human contact will remain central to our ability to practice, we need to focus more attention on creating productivity through the use of technology on the back end: in record keeping and billing systems for example. We will be working with community providers in the coming several years to see if there are ways to collectively streamline these functions to provide more and better service for the same money.

Finally, we need to focus attention on workforce issues. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that many students are graduating from college with debt that cannot be paid off with public sector jobs. This leaves our field in a precarious position as people age and retire without replacements waiting in the wings. In addition, the science of the field is rapidly progressing while the practice remains largely as it was in the 1980s. We need to simultaneously draw more people to the field and raise the competency of those practicing. No small task. We are currently involved with a work force survey that will be the basis of the development of a workforce development plan. As that plan is developed, we will report on its progress here.

Office INFORMATION

Director's Corner

What's New - 8/1/02 update: