Just More than a Week to CADCA’s National Leadership Forum

With just more than a week to go until CADCA’s 22nd Annual National Leadership Forum, Feb. 6-9 at the Gaylord National, coalitions might want to start packing. CADCA guarantees that participants will come back to their communities with more than what they brought such as new strategies for addressing communities’ drug, alcohol and tobacco problems.

The Forum, the nation’s largest conference for community prevention leaders, treatment professionals and researchers, is more of a “movement” than a “conference.” The four-day event will be packed with multiple opportunities to learn the latest strategies to fight substance abuse and hear from nationally-known experts and policymakers.

Among the more than 80 workshops available at CADCA’s Forum is “Advocating Against Medical Marijuana Dispensaries and the Legalization of Marijuana.”

With 16 states and the District of Columbia having legalized marijuana for medicinal use, and with “marijuana as medicine” ballot initiatives passed in 14 states, coalition experts say it’s not a matter of “if,” but “when” medical marijuana advocates could target your community.

Shereen Khatapoush, PhD, Director, Youth Services System, Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, Fighting Back, in Santa Barbara, Calif., will be presenting the workshop with her colleague and CADCA Coalition Advisory Committee member, Penny Jenkins, President/CEO for Santa Barbara’s Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, on how their coalition of community members are "fighting back" against marijuana dispensaries and the recreational use of the drug in their city and in surrounding communities.

National data reveals that the attitudes about marijuana are changing. Fewer 8th and 10th graders believe smoking marijuana is dangerous. These declines in the perception of harm invariably precede increases in substance use.

Khatapoush said coalitions need a place to share best practices and ideas to fight medical marijuana strategically. Jenkins and Khatapoush plan to assess  from participants where they are from and what their particular issues are, then address their problems in small groups, debrief in one large group, and have an ample question-and-answer period to encourage lessons learned from Santa Barbara.

“We want to offer our experiences to encourage the “cross-pollination” of participants,” Khatapoush said.

Coalition members also might want to consider attending related workshops such as Ohio’s Drug-Free Action Alliance’s “Marijuana as Medicine: Stating the Evident” and “Considerations for Addressing Medical Marijuana and Marijuana Legalization” presented by CADCA’s Sue Thau and Kevin Sabet.”

For more information about this and other workshops at the Forum, visit http://forum.cadca.org. Register now!

CADCA encourages you to promote your youth and adult attendance at the Forum. Simply download our press release template, tailor it to your specific coalition and send it out to your local media outlets.