Wide Range of Participants Attend Underage Drinking Conference

This year's National Leadership Conference took its theme borrowing from the landmark report, Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility, released by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council at the National Academies of Sciences.

This year's Conference was the largest one yet with approximately 1,200 registrants from nearly every State as well as from Europe and South America. Keynote and plenary speakers featured senior level Federal administrators, State policymakers, representatives of national advocacy organizations and prevention advocates who have achieved widespread success working within their respective States. Over 130 speakers shared their ideas and expertise.

Sandy Wilson, Drivers License and Traffic Safety at NDDOT, and Ray Becker, Stark County Sheriff's office, attended the conference. They attended as many of the workshops as they could by splitting up and attending them separately.

Ray attended workshops that were more targeted towards law enforcement issues, but also towards community issues. One thing that was impressed upon him was that juvenile alcoholism is more of an adult problem, not as much a juvenile problem. Juveniles need to get the alcohol from someone over the age of twenty-one. Adults need to be taught that it is NOT ok for kids to drink. Ray learned the young drinkers' most common alcohol (Budweiser) and what times youth are at risk for drinking. Nationally, the high risk times are between three and five in the afternoon, and the majority of date rapes and violent crimes by youth have some kind of alcohol involvement.

One of the workshops Ray attended was the "Is the Party Over Yet? San Diego Social Host Campaign." Detective Larry Darwent of the San Diego Police Department was a speaker for this workshop and told participants about the extreme problems San Diego was having with underage drinking. They learned about the approaches used to generate support for passage of the "San Diego County's Underage Drinking Initiative's Social Access Workgroup" ordinances. The group has successfully passed 15 social host ordinances in San Diego County. Critical campaign elements, from public awareness campaigns to enforcement techniques and adjudication data, were addressed. Participants also benefited from a "lessons learned" portion of the workshop.

Sandy attended many workshops targeted towards communities. The ones she enjoyed the most were "An Adult Messed Up: Underage Drinking in Rural Communities" and Key Steps for Conducting Alcohol Compliance Checks. The first one, "An Adult Messed Up", gave information that is useful for small communities. Bill Deutsch talked about the mentality of the rural communities, such as, "It is all right, we did it when we were kids" and "at least they're not doing drugs". Ideas were given on how to address those perceptions and how to change that way of thinking.

The Alcohol Compliance workshop gave useful information on how to conduct an effective compliance check and then went on to show how to analyze the data that is collected from those checks and how to be more efficient. This workshop had a little something for everyone; from beginning compliance checks, to studying data collected for those communities that have been doing checks for some time.

These three workshops will be held at the Alcohol Forum, January 25 & 26, 2005 in Bismarck, along with "A Fork in the Road": The Path to Reducing Underage Drinking in Your Community by Penny Norton, CEO and Founder of FACE: Truth and Clarity in Alcohol. This workshop will provide commonsense answers to complex issues, and was also featured at the national conference.