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Implementing Reclaiming Futures means including families and youth in building service plans for individual teens -- and in improving services overall.  Need help doing it?
Consider attending the 2009 Building Family Strengths conference on June 23-25, 2009, in Portland, OR - you can even submit a proposal for a presentation, if you do so by this Friday, February 6, 2009.  

In my work with juvenile justice agencies and drug treatment professionals, I still hear people call cannabis (or marijuana) a "gateway" drug. This is one of those notions that just won't go away despite the availability of good information that disproves it. 

One of the key pieces of the Reclaiming Futures model is to hook teens up with fun things to do with adult role models while they're in treatment and on probation.

According to data culled by the Center for Substance Abuse Research (CESAR) from the University of Michigan's ongoing Monitoring the Future study, high school seniors are now about as likely to smoke marijuana as cigarettes: 19.4% reported using marijuana in the last 30 days, vs. the 20.4% lof seniors who reported smoking cigarettes. 
Both cigarette use and marijuana use by seniors have been declining since 1997 -- but cigarette use has dropped much more quickly. 
This is the first time since the early 1980s that cigarette and marijuana use have paralleled each other so closely. (Click on the image for a closer look at the numbers.)

Judge Bettina Borders has some questions for you.
Judge Borders is first justice of the Bristol County Juvenile Court at the Reclaiming Futures site in Bristol County, MA. Her site is in the process of developing a uniform drug screening tool.* As part of the process, the judge would like to hear from other jurisdictions about the following:

Reclaiming Futures focuses on teens with alcohol and drug problems who are in trouble with the law. A key component of our approach is to integrate the existing systems that work with youth, which can mean working on an even broader array of youth issues.
One Reclaiming Futures site that's done that very well? Anchorage, Alaska. Over the past two years, the Anchorage site worked to bring together all of the local coalitions working on youth issues into one effort, called Anchorage United for Youth, organizing around three common goals:

Two major organizations involved in fighting addiction and substance abuse have merged: CASA -- the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University -- and Join Together, based at Boston University. (Both, incidentally, are Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grantees, like Reclaiming Futures).

Charles M. Blow, in an Op-Ed in the January 9th New York Times, reported some scary data from the annual Monitoring the Future study:
...[T]he percentage of both black and white 12th graders who confessed to using cocaine in the past 30 days has essentially stayed flat since 2001. The major difference is that white usage outweighs black usage 4 to 1.
He goes on to add:

Listen in on January 15, 2009 to an audio webcast on what bad economic news might mean for reforming children's health care -- including Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) funds.