The Network Addressing Collegiate Alcohol and Other Drug Issues

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports the positive news that fewer deaths occurred on our nation's roads in 2011 (NHTSA’s National Center for Statistics and Analysis, 2012a, 2012b).  A lower, but still depressingly high 32,367 people were killed in crashes in 2011.  That’s a 1.9% decrease from 2010, and represents the fewest fatalities since 1949.  When controlling for population growth and increased vehicle miles driven, the fatality rate is about a third what it was back in the early 1980s.

Drunk driving (or more precisely driving with a BAC=.08+) continues to account for a large proportion of the fatal crashes.  But those too declined by 2.5% and now account for 31% of the deaths.

Here are a few important national statics from the report:

Perhaps you’ve wondered what frankincense really is, and why it’s included in the list of items the Three Wise Men carried as gifts.  Well frankincense is indeed a type of incense, and had been used as a psychoactive drug since ancient times.  Coming from the Bosellia (or Frankincense) tree, the incense is the resin extracted from slits in the bark (Ratsch, 2005).  It was a

Information about the 2013 Alcohol and Other Drug Educational Conference is now available on the CSU Chico website.  You can now easily find registration, lodging and other conference information. Stay tuned for the program proposal information to be included there as well.

Over 1,300 California drivers were randomly stopped on weekend nights and agreed to give alcohol breath tests and oral fluids for drug testing in nine cities across the state.  The survey was anonymous and voluntary.  The methods for the survey closely followed other roadside surveys, and a report is now available on the OTS website (Lacey, Kelley-Baker, Romano, Brainard, & Ramirez, 2012).  Drugs tested included illegal drugs as well as plausibly impairing medications.

Here are some of their main findings:

• Drug-positive drivers made up about 1 in 7 drivers, a third of those drivers tested positive for more than one drug.
• The percent of drivers testing positive for marijuana (7.4%) was almost identical to the percent testing positive for alcohol (7.3%).
• About a quarter of marijuana-positive drivers also tested positive for another drug; about 13.3% marijuana-positive were also positive for alcohol.
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