For over a decade, the Safety First project of the Drug Policy Alliance has worked to educate young people, their teachers, and their parents, about the risks and consequences of the use of drugs, including methamphet- amine. In the effort to prevent drug abuse, we have produced written and electronic educational materials, and reached out to and partnered with pragmatic individuals and organizations around the world. In this presentation, Marsha Rosenbaum, founder of the Safety First Project, discusses strategies for prevention. The presentation features an educational tool, a video produced by our federally-funded New Mexico Meth Education Project, of young people expressing their thoughts about methamphetamine and other drugs. Dr. Rosenbaum then discusses effective strategies for prevention, including an analysis of the problem of drug use among youth, which approaches have been effective, which have failed, and why, and how we might proceed. Her booklet, „Safety First: A Reality-Based Approach to Teen and Drugs“ which has been translated into a dozen languages, will be available in English and Czech. Marsha Rosenbaum is director emerita of the Safety First Project (www.safety1st.org) and of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance, a drug policy institute, headquartered in New York (www.drugpolicy. org). She received her doctorate in medical sociology from the University of California at San Francisco in 1979. From 1977 to 1995, Rosenbaum was the principal investigator on National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded studies of heroin addiction, methadone maintenance treatment, MDMA (Ecstasy), cocaine, and drug use during pregnancy. She is author of three books: Women on Heroin, Pursuit of Ecstasy: The MDMA Experience (with Jerome E. Beck), and Pregnant Women on Drugs: Combating Stereotypes and Stigma (with Sheigla Murphy); four booklets: Just Say What?: An Alternative View on Solving America's Drug Problem; Kids, Drugs, and Drug Education: A Harm Reduction Approach; Safety First: A Reality-Based Approach to Teens, Drugs, and Drug Education (currently in its third printing and translated into Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Polish, Ukrainian and Romanian), Making Sense of Student Drug Testing: Why Educators are Saying No (1st and 2nd editions with Jennifer Kern, Fatema Gunja, Alexandra Cox and Judith Appel), 2007 Safety First: A Reality-Approach to Teens and Drugs, as well as numerous scholarly articles about drug use, addiction, women, treatment, and drug policy. Rosenbaum has written opin- ion pieces for the USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Detroit News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Newsday, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Post- Intelligencer, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, The Orange County Register, San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Daily News, La Opinión, The Daytona Beach News-Journal, Oakland Tribune, The Times (Trenton, New Jersey), Orlando Weekly, and AlterNet. She co-chaired the international conferences, „Just Say Know: New Directions in Drug Education“ in 1999 and „The State of Ecstasy: The Medicine, Science and Culture of MDMA“ in 2001, Beyond Zero Tolerance: New Directions in Drug Education and School Discipline in 2006, and organized the California Statewide Task Force on Effective Drug Education in 2003. Rosenbaum regu- larly speaks to PTAs, other parent groups, schools, drug treatment and prevention pro- fessionals and the media about teenagers and drugs, Ecstasy, and drug policy issues. Dr. Rosenbaum has a 30-year-old daughter, a 24-year-old son and two adult step-daughters.

Drug Policy Alliance San Francisco

First global conference on methamphetamine science, strategy and response, Prague, 15-16 September 2008