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Before rejoicing at recovery, treatment must be available
This September marks the 20th National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month. That spans a generation of celebrations of our fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and other loved ones being returned to us from the torments of addiction. Over the course of the past two decades, tens of thousands of New Jersey families have been made whole again through recovery.

Time to accept drug war as failed policy
It hardly comes as a revelation that the drug war, with its imprisonment of countless thousands of non-violent offenders, has been a fiasco. Nearly everyone versed with this issue, from the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske, on down, has pronounced the drug war an utterly misguided and wrong-headed policy, one that has done little but waste both lives and dollars.

NCADD-NJ Resolves to Close State's Treatment Gap
New Jersey is confronted with a disease that affects hundreds of thousands of its citizens. Yet despite a toll that one associates with an epidemic and the fact that it devastates entire families when it strikes, the resources allocated to treating this disease are severely lacking. No, it is not an influenza, swine or otherwise. It is addiction to alcohol and drugs.

Youth drinking starts well before college
The Amethyst Initiative’s proposed debate on lowering the drinking age has spurred a great deal of interest in campus alcohol use nationwide. In New Jersey, Senate President Richard Codey responded by calling for a review of all New Jersey college drinking policies and, following that, a Senate Education Committee hearing on the issue. In putting the attention almost entirely on the excessive drinking done by undergraduates, officials risk failing to confront the problem where it originates.

Fast Track Keg Registration
Thanks should go to state Commission on Higher Education Executive Director Jane Oates for issuing a call, at a recent Senate Education Committee (SEC) hearing on college drinking, to fast track a state-wide keg registration measure. The keg registration bill (S-1349/A-781), which is sponsored by SEC Chairwoman Shirley Turner, has languished in Trenton for years.

College drinking has early roots
Senate President Richard Codey and Senator Shirley Turner recently weighed in on the controversy over the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) stirred by the Amethyst Initiative and the group of college presidents who suggested the time had come for a debate this issue.

Appalling actions in Lodi
“I was appalled,” Lodi Mayor Karen Viscana said on hearing the news. Her reaction suggested she had learned of some recent calamity. Perhaps Mayor Viscana was reacting to the Myanmar government’s continued refusal to admit aid workers to the country to assist cyclone victims? But no, that was not it. She was not responding to a disaster on that scale or, for that matter, on any scale. What the mayor found so repellent was that the town’s zoning officer, Joel Lavin, had approved an application for a methadone clinic within the town.

Enact statewide keg registration
January 16, 2008 - Gov. Jon Corzine’s Teen Driving Study Commission recently held a hearing to gather testimony on how to reduce the number of accidents involving young drivers. An aspect of this issue that, despite its long history, still needs greater attention is the combination of youth drinking and driving. NCADD-NJ provided the commission with data on keg registration demonstrating that the policy is an effective means of both reducing youth alcohol use and the car wrecks that result.

Recovery for addiction recovery
September 13, 2007 - September is designated National Addiction Recovery Month, which focuses on what is sometimes called ‘the other side of addiction.’ That other side is not well understood by many of the public, despite the fact that alcohol and drug problems affect nearly one in three families in New Jersey, according to a survey commissioned by the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence-New Jersey.

Parity a remedy to health care costs
June 27, 2007 - A recent guest opinion in the Bergen Record, “Don’t add to businesses’ already high health costs,” stated that the reason mental health and addiction parity legislation is so controversial is because no one is addressing the vital issue of cost. Whatever one thinks of New Jersey’s parity legislation, S-807/A-2512, it defies logic and shuns all evidence to suggest it ignores cost.

Parity fosters economic health
May 22, 2007 - A recent Home News Tribune editorial supported the measure before the New Jersey Legislature to require insurance coverage for mental illness and addiction equal to what is provided for other medical conditions. The reason for issue’s steady advance through the state Legislature is not a simply a matter of fairness.

Keg registration will choke a source of alcohol for youth
March 8, 2007 - When police broke up a recent keg party at a house in East Brunswick, their arrival was obviously unwelcome by the teenagers in attendance. What is troubling about the high school students’ reaction to the police is the youth seemed to feel they had had their rights violated. Their right, that is, to be intoxicated.

Celebrity cases continue to give rise to skepticsim on addiction
October 24, 2006 - There has lately been a handful of public figures – actors and politicians – proclaiming themselves alcoholics. These outpourings come, for the most part, on the heals of some humiliation that in itself is all but unpardonable.

NCADD-NJ presses for tax increase, treatment dedication
May 25, 2006 - NCADD – New Jersey fully supports Parent to Parent’s Just A Nickel a Gallon campaign to dedicate $10 million from Governor Corzine’s expected $15 million increase in alcohol tax revenue to the Alcohol Education Rehabilitation and Enforcement Fund (AEREF). The AEREF disburses $11 million annually to counties for addiction prevention and treatment and drunken driving enforcement efforts. This allocation has not changed since 1992.

Parity legislation needs support of Corzine
Jan. 19, 2006 - Incoming Gov. Jon Corzine immediately set a tone of reform in the state in the weeks before he took the oath of office. An issue greatly in need of his attention that has nothing to do with pay to play but that is critical to the state’s well-being would require health insurers to cover addiction and mental illnesses as they do other medical conditions.

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