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Town Hall Meetings Tackle Underage Drinking |
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From Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs News: A series of more than 1,200 town-hall meetings on underage drinking held in late March and April largely succeeded in their main goal of raising community awareness about the problem of youth alcohol use. But some organizers and participants worried that the meetings were too long on personal anecdotes and too short on specific action steps and followup. The meetings, held in conjunction with Alcohol Awareness Month, were sponsored by the federal Interagency Coordinating Committee for the Prevention of Underage Drinking, which sponsored a pair of regional trainings to help local communities get the meetings off the ground. An April 24 town-hall meeting in Maine, for example, included testimony from police chiefs, state Attorney General Steven Rowe, and the Maine Office of Substance Abuse, which reported that while 83 percent of Maine parents don't think their children drink, 65 percent of their children say they have. "Before the dialogue began, we stated that the purpose of the meeting was to hear and learn from the teens' perspective how they view the drinking/drugging problem in out community, and how we as adults can work with them to minimize risk factors and make Yorktown a safer place for them to flourish." The alcohol industry also had a presence at some meetings: Diageo North America representatives took part in town halls in Castro Valley, Calif., and Richmond, Va. At the town hall meeting held in Decatur, Ind., organizers passed around a copy of Join Together's "Get Serious" petition, which calls on lawmakers to take action against alcohol-related problems.
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