"Health & Medical News"

By Bob Curley

An upcoming HBO series on addiction is being viewed as a unique opportunity to educate the public about a disease that affects more than 22 million Americans — and many more family members — but is widely misunderstood.? 

The 14-part HBO documentary series is the linchpin of the “Addiction” project, but it’s far from the only component. A collaboration between HBO, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the campaign also includes a companion book, a comprehensive addiction information website at HBO, and a national community-outreach program coordinated by Join Together, Faces and Voices of Recovery, and Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA). A four-DVD version of the documentaries will be sold for a minimal price at retail outlets and online.

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Oklahoma will no longer offer a loan repayment program intended to encourage physicians to practice in the state’s rural communities. But health care advocates say it was a small sacrifice because state lawmakers agreed to continue funding three other — much larger — programs that help rural communities attract primary care physicians.

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Delray Beach, Fla., located between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, has emerged as the country’s largest and most vibrant recovery community, with many halfway houses and 5,000 people a week attending 12-step meetings, the New York Times reported on Nov. 16.

The recovery community in Delray Beach exists well beyond the walls of the community’s rehabilitation centers, with recovery radio shows, a recovery motorcycle club, and a coffeehouse with its own therapy group. Because it is a compact area, recovering people cross paths daily along the shops and bistros of Atlantic Avenue, oblivious to the tourists and “normies,” their term for sober people not in recovery.

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The Community Tool Box is just what it sounds like — a virtual workbench full of useful information for anyone involved in community-based organizing, including substance abuse and gun violence programs.

Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Kansas Health Foundation and the Kansas Alcohol and Drug Abuse Services Commission, the Community Tool Box has been online since 1996. Initially conceived as a distance-learning project to provide the tools needed to build healthier, stronger communities, it soon became apparent that the best way for the project to disseminate information internationally would be via the Internet, according to Tim Brownlee, coordinator for the Community Tool Box at the University of Kansas’ Work Group on Health Promotion and Community Development.

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