recovery, it gave me back my life. now i can give back. for drug and alcohol treatment referral for you or someone you know, call 1-800-662-help. how was school today? the session go alright? you have a good session? want to go to the game with me? i got tickets to the game. talk with the kids in your life about drugs and alcohol, and if they're in treatment or recovery, support them, even if you have to practice. i am so proud of you. for drug and alcohol information and treatment referral, call 1-800-662-help. [music] [music]

faces and voices of recovery is a national organization of people in recovery, their families, and allies. and we're working to organize and mobilize these people to promote better public policy and to change public perceptions of people in recovery. people with mental illnesses and addictive disorders often have a difficult time getting the kind of treatment that they need when they need it. there are also problems like higher copays and deductibles as well as other discriminatory practices by insurance companies. the paul wellstone mental health and addiction equity act is a bill that was introduced to congress this year to end insurance discrimination against people with mental illnesses and addictive disorders. at first, people didn't even know that

the bill had been introduced. and so we started to educate people about the fact that this was growing in importance in washington. well our strategy was to show congress that there was strong support for this bill. and we used capwiz to keep people updated regularly. we send them updates on the progress of the bill, and we've also been able to send them out targeted action alerts that allow them to have personalized contact with their members of congress, so they're able to send emails, faxes, make phone calls, and in general make their voices heard by the people who matter on the hill. we also use it to send out educational materials and advocacy tools that allow people to get active and engaged. people will call us and let us know, "oh, i did this." i called my representative, or i faxed my representative, or i talked to the health legislative assistant about x, y, or z. so we've been getting a lot of feedback from people that they're taking action, whereas maybe in the beginning people

were just in an information gathering stage. this is a very personal issue for our constituency. so for them to feel like they're having an impact is very meaningful. the internet is a double edged sword, i think, when it comes to youth population, particularly as we talk about prevention services and as we talk about online services. there's also another side of that where they can actually go in and see how to make drugs. where they are, they can get them online. is that something that this nation needs to be concerned with? yes, kids can go out and find how to cook up certain drugs and find especially find a lot of rah-rah kind of pro-drug messages. i'm actually even more concerned about how a lot of alcoholic beverages are marketed to youth and, particularly, with some of the alcohol industry, alcohol energy drinks.

some of the sites like the one for spikes, for instance, looks like it was designed for kids and by kids. and there's trinkets and trash and there are games, and so i think that parents need to be equally aware of that really big danger as well as all the information about other drugs too. there was one energy drink that was going to be called cocaine at one point. yes, it was. correct? um hum. and i was just taken aback. i mean how could anyone present a product that is strictly marketed to the sensationalism around that product. having a 21-year-old son who is much more computer web site savvy than i have ever been, it's very, very difficult to monitor your child's use on the computer. and with our web site, you know anybody can log in and with

an anonymous identity and a password, and you assume they're telling the truth but you don't know. we're working right now on a way for people to interpret questions on a password that would not normally be understood by someone 13 years old or younger so that they can't do that. dr. alemi. i just want to... you know a drug pusher needs to have physical contact with a drug user. so the internet is not very helpful to a drug pusher or a drug salesperson. the internet, on the other hand, has been used for example for sales of cigarettes, you know, more of the legal drugs. for me cigarettes is considered a drug. now, public policy needs to change to prevent those kinds of sales because the teenagers can go online and can order cigarettes and they do arrive in the mailbox and it is a problem

and it is a big problem. it's not a small... 14 percent of cigarette sales now is going on the internet. that's a huge amount. well that is alarming. they're going on and they're probably buying prescriptions online as well and getting those because there's you know and we have seen a steady increase in prescription misuse among young populations. but let me get to the parent. have you spoken to your young children about how they use... well we are in a household of four people, me and my wife and two children, and we have seven computers. so, you know, we talk to them all the time about these things, but really we talk to them about living their lives also. it's not separate. the internet is just our lives. so we talk to them. we try to monitor, but it's not possible because

each one of them has a computer in their bedroom. they have computers in the living room. they have computers that they carry out with them. so we can't really be over their shoulders looking at things. and i don't think it's reasonable to expect parents to do that. but, what is reasonable is to talk like you talk about any issue, so have a good solid relationship with your child so that they come to you and talk to you and you understand what's happening in their lives. and really those are the protective factors that i want to get to. i think that just as we blame the internet for some of the dangers, we can also use some of the programs that exist on the internet. i know that the center for substance abuse prevention at samhsa has done quite a number of programs in support of raising those protective factors in terms of preventing youth from getting into trouble to begin with.

eric. that's just what i was going to say, that there are positive resources that parents can make available to their kids. even if it's just adding it quietly to the bookmarks on the kids' computer, so that they might see it or just talk about them and say hey have you been to the partnership for drug free america's youth site or ondcp or samhsa's youth site because they are very well done. parents can go to sites by those same organizations and find some real live tips on what to do. so i think that being engaged is important. and no, i think no parent is going to be able to keep up with their kids' use, but that doesn't mean they can't plug in and know a few well-chosen reliable web sites that are very engaging and talk the kids' language so that those kids have an alternative to the beer marketing and to the pro-drug messages. that's exactly right. you have to have something that is as enticing as myspace and youtube that gives them a positive message that looks for

lack of a better word, i've been told this is used, sexy. it's got to be a sexy site so they will gravitate toward that rather than going towards something that's detrimental and self-destructive with a positive message but looks the same. it catches them that this is sexy and they will go to that site. that's right. a lot of beer marketing sites do soap opera narratives that are very engaging and great stories. so a good prevention site, and i've seen them do the same tactics but tell a very different kind of story about healthy living. you know the funny thing is our team was looking at the other day charlie bit me. this is a youtube snippet of two young children and they're in the same little stroller and 33 million visits, 33 million visits to this one site within youtube. so it's amazing and i think parents just need

to get on the youtube. they need to see what's on there. they need to be aware. yeah, they need to produce things for youtube and... absolutely. and they also need to think through games, very important because you need to; products, anti-drug use messages need to be placed inside these games that are... because you play the games over and over again. it's like constant advertisement. so if you can place in the product a message that this is drug use, is not good, that will make a huge difference. and it almost has to be subliminal because... absolutely. i mean it has to be in a way, i mean you have to be as smart as the people that are countering that message that you want to put out there because right now, through the viral marketing, you don't even know until the very end that there's a product at the end of that message, and you're just playing along and watching it and laughing and thinking, oh, how funny this is

or how interesting this is, and at the end, the whoever's marketing a product, boy they'll hit you with that product. and we were watching yesterday, and i said you know this is really a product-based message for people to consume and it's all done in a joke and i think you're right. you're absolutely right. when we come back we're going to take a look at the future. we're going to take a look at some other aspects of online services. we'll be right back. the heart of recovery month are the hundreds of national, regional, state, and local events held throughout the country. get involved with recovery month and join the thousands of people who organize and participate in events each september. here's an example. the alaska state department of health and social services behavioral health held its second annual poetry slam. many poets read and recited original work

related to addiction recovery. these pieces were then judged by members of the community. for more information on national alcohol and drug addiction recovery month, events in your town, and how you can get involved, visit the recovery month web site at recoverymonth.gov. [music] "intervention," an original non-fiction program on the a&e network that launched in march 2005, examines addiction in all its forms. "intervention" highlights personal stories of people struggling with the disease of addiction, and how they begin their journeys toward recovery. originally produced for television, episodes and highlights are available for online viewing. in addition to bringing the program to a much broader

audience, the intervention website also offers valuable insights and resources as well as links to treatment and recovery centers throughout the united states and canada. to view personal stories of individuals, their families, and friends dealing with the disease of addiction visit aetv.com/intervention. everyone with alcohol and drug addiction is in the same boat. with treatment you can find solid ground. for drug and alcohol information and treatment referral for you or someone you know, call 1-800-662-help. drug and alcohol addiction, you lose your way.

but there is a way out. you can find direction, find support, treatment, find yourself and your life, your direction home. for drug and alcohol treatment referral for you or someone you know, call 1-800-662-help. [music] if someone you know needs help for a substance use disorder, where do you turn to find treatment? the substance abuse treatment facility locator was created just for this purpose. it is a searchable directory of more than 11 and a half thousand treatment programs around the country that treat alcoholism, alcohol abuse, and drug abuse problems. the locator searches for the facilities in the nearest city or address that you specify and displays maps showing

the exact locations of the treatment facilities that meet your search criteria. to access the treatment locator, go to the recovery month 2008 web site and click the link to locate a treatment center in your area. from there, you can customize your search and the locator will give you a list of the treatment centers nearest to you. thank you, have a great day. [music] one of the things we haven't talked about yet is really the privacy issue. cynthia, i know that you basically said that your site is secure. what do people need to keep in mind? what does secure mean? good question.

when they come into our site and they've chosen to participate in one of our groups, they're given a screen name and a user password. everything in our site and in our group room is 128 bit k encrypted. that's the highest government encryption rate that they can. so let's say they were online and somebody decided to pick up a telephone if they were a dialup, they would not hear anything that was going on in that group. again, the anonymity part of it is the screen names, the user screen names. so they're not letting anybody else know who they are. we also, we don't put cookies on their machine. and they have to actually enter into our treatment program, initiate the contact with us, participate, and as soon as they disengage from the treatment session, that's it. we let that computer go. some of the sites that you will visit in the internet will put a cookie, and they'll follow your machine. every time you log on they'll know where you're logging onto to see the sites that you're visiting. we don't do that here. i would say that one of the things that

we all struggle with is we're saving spam. so i'm very cautious about publicly posting my email address. if you go to jointogether.org web site and you go to a news article, there are comments at the bottom, but we encourage people not to place their email address. so that's a simple thing but something that can save you a lot of grief and other problems, and not to place personally identifiable information in a public space, very different when you're in a secure online. the other thing i would say is that the strongest technological security on the server side is useless if the user puts their password on a sticky note on a publicly accessible machine. so just the human vulnerability that we all are susceptible to is something worth reminding your users to... we'll keep you safe but we can't keep... we have to trust you to keep your password safe. one of the places where they do want their email to go, however, at the join together site is that you offer a daily news brief for folks. yes. we do encourage people to provide us the email address,

which we do store very safely and securely; and we send a daily or a weekly email update to about 45,000 people who are parents, treatment professionals, prevention professionals, youth advocates; and we help them stay up to date with the day's developments in public policy, research, resources, like new websites like e get going, and other information. let's talk about the traditional prevention and addiction treatment, a community-based setting. should they... you know many of them probably look at this new internet with trepidation and say well you know this isn't going to work because it's really something that is so, as i was saying before, impersonal and so on and so forth. is there a legitimate concern? what are really some of the concerns that are valid from that sector and how can we get it to be

a more integrated system? i'll be happy to address that. coming from a community-based 12 step recovery program, i had concerns about getting involved in this project. and how i got involved in this was that the woman who is the executive director was looking for people to videotape their stories to put on this new site that she was trying to create, and i choose not to have any anonymity. so i speak at schools and prisons and churches and things. so i videotaped my story, and we became instant friends, and she asked me if i'd like to work on this project with her. and i thought what in heaven's name can i, a 50 something woman, you know. i go to aa and na meetings you know. but over the last year and a half it has been amazing that my traditional background in recovery, i can't address prevention, i can only address recovery,

has grown on this road. and i have developed relationships with the most wonderful people that i don't know who they are and we care about each other. and i've gotten to the point where i keep my computer on all night in my chat room in case somebody needs you. i really think that it's not an issue of taking away from existing real world contact. there is so much need out there that is unmet. agreed. people cannot find treatment, and there are so many different roads to recovery. so online modality is whether that's screening or whether that's intensive counseling or whether that's peer support are there for people who, for whatever reason either don't need, don't want, or can't access in person services. there is always going to be a need for residential treatment for instance, and there is always going to be a need for in-person 12 step groups. but my encouragement to the field is to not be afraid but to look at this as an opportunity to reach even more people.

and even, i'll get to you in one second cynthia. i just want to say na, aa, and alanon alateen have a site which is recoveryrealm.com as well. so they're recognizing that there's a whole new platform that they can join in order to provide their group settings through the internet. cynthia. good point. when we decided to do this in 2000, we really thought about the continuum of care because i'm completely in agreement with you. i'm a traditionally trained therapist. i believe in face to face. it has a part. it's a part of what you can do. we use it for early intervention and education. we use it for primary treatment and we also have used it as a step down from an in-patient or a treatment community-based setting and then to a continuing care program where they can access treatment longer. statistics clearly show the longer you stay connected,

the better the opportunity for a positive result at the end. and i also wanted to say to your point, ginger, that when we first started this i had my counselors, all of whom are in recovery, go on to the 12 step sites, the friends-of sites, and participate, because i wanted to know what their experience was as they went through this process. we give those kind of referrals out to the people who participate in our groups. you have to know what's out there to give it. so we get online and we're actually in those groups too and participate. dr. alemi. i think this is the point you were making, cynthia, is right on. there is not a choice between either or. these are complimentary services. now treatment providers, clinicians who are unfortunately are poorly trained in their access of computers. so they tend to avoid their computers in their services, and that is not healthy. that's a problem in the training programs

much more than in the clinicians. so those programs have to modify. they have to resolve. all these surveys show that patients want to have... about 80 to 90 percent of patients want to have email contact with their clinicians, but surprisingly only 5 to 10 percent of clinicians want to have emails from their patients. so there is a real disconnect between what patients want and what clinicians have been trained to do. so right now we're in a shortage. treatment counselors are difficult to find. their salaries need to go up so that we can recruit more people into this field. as you were saying a while ago, they are aging and the field needs much more of the treatment counselors, but it needs a different type. the treatment services can look to online modality as a good front door, too, that no one's afraid of having a telephone because people call and make appointments. but if you think about sites like alcohol screening,

we also have drugscreening.org, which is for other drugs besides alcohol. and those are ways to steer people towards that first awareness that they might need to find something and then go find a local resource. and the other point i wanted to make is that why cannot an online support community like you have or even online treatment be, go along with and be an ancillary, too, in-person prevention or treatment services, and we all want those to work better. absolutely. without question. i think as we look at what's coming up and let's start looking at future, because part of future means that in terms of what dr. h. wesley clark, our director, points out is that we're going to have to begin to look at recovery-centered or recovery-oriented care, which means as you focus on the individual but that individual, you know, gets taken care of at whatever level

or whatever entry point within that public health sector they intersect into the assessment and get told that they have a problem. so what happens? it's not only the assessment, and we want the nurses to do the assessment. we want the physicians to be able to do it. we want emergency rooms to be able to do it. but what happens to that? who creates a plan for that person from the time that they have that ah ha moment that i need help to the time that they join a recovery online group or a person-to-person online group? is that where we're headed. exactly, we are headed to that, but there are two trends that are coming up that would be of major advantage to be online. one is medication-based treatment is going to primary care settings. what that means is that counseling is being left out. so how would you deliver in 17-minute contact that

a physician has with a patient counseling? you can't. so the patient takes this buprenorphine, goes to some rural setting, comes back a month later, and the counseling has to somehow connect with this patient; and that's not happening effectively right now, and that can be a huge role for online. the other issue that's the other big trend that we are facing is personalized medicine. and here we are seeing research projects coming out with looking at better ways of fitting antidepressants, which is a comorbidity of a lot of substance abusers, depression is, to the patient's characteristics better, so that they have less side effects, so it's more effective for them and that they are more compliant with it. that also requires an online communication with the patient because fitting the medication to the patient requires several days of communication.

well i want to end up. we always talk about obviously national alcohol and drug addiction recovery month, which is in september and this year it's join the voices for recovery, real people real recovery. but part of that is really getting the whole recovery community to really continue to be vocal because now we're moving away from the concept of stigma and more into the concept of really dealing with a very, putting a very positive face on recovery so that the communities and all of the health systems and all of the other stakeholders within community really recognize the value of treatment. so any comments related to how online can really help to move this issue along? well i think that people in recovery who can choose their lel of anonymity, as you said from your personal experience, can understand that they can be a powerful force for change; and they can go to web sites like the

facesandvoicesofrecovery.org website, which mobilizes that community for solid public policy change to increase access to treatment. and there's no reason why that can't happen, and i think that the understanding of what it means to have anonymity and to be in recovery is changing. it is changing, and the beauty of something like the second road is that i can go on that and see that people are clean and sober. their programs are working. they can interact with people. there are videos. there are, as i said, chat rooms, all those things that lets me know that recovery is fun. recovery is possible. it's a blast, and it can happen to everybody. well i want to thank you for being here. we hope that everyone that is listening to this program also participates in recovery month in 2008 and do an event, whether it's a home event, whether you participate

in an event that someone else is putting together, but get engaged, get involved in joining the voices for recovery. thank you for being here. [music] every september, national alcohol and drug addiction recovery month provides an opportunity for communities like yours to raise awareness of alcohol and drug use disorders and highlight the effectiveness of treatment. the free recovery month kit can help your organization plan events and activities in commemoration of this year's recovery month observance. this user friendly kit offers ideas, materials, and tools for planning, organizing, and realizing an event or outreach campaign that matches your goals and resources. to obtain your copy of this year's recovery month kit and gain access to other free publications and materials related to addiction treatment and recovery issues,