Alcohol use by young people is extremely dangerous - both to themselves and society at large. Underage alcohol use is associated with traffic fatalities, violence, unsafe sex, suicide, educational failure, and other problem behaviors that diminish the prospects of future success, as well as health risks â€" and the earlier teens start drinking, the greater the danger. Despite these serious concerns, the media continues to make drinking look attractive to youth, and it remains possible and even easy for teenagers to get access to alcohol. Why is this dangerous behavior so pervasive? What can be done to prevent it? What will work and who is responsible for making sure it happens? Reducing Underage Drinking addresses these questions and proposes a new way to combat underage alcohol use. It explores the ways in which may different individuals and groups contribute to the problem and how they can be enlisted to prevent it. Reducing Underage Drinking will serve as both a game plan and a call to arms for anyone with an investment in youth health and safety.
You're sitting in a windowless conference room. Twenty minutes into the meeting the presenter finally makes it to slide four of a thirty two- slide deck. At least you can read this one, unlike the others, which were crammed with numbers, graphs and charts. You look around, wondering if anyone else is following the presentation. Just about everyone these days suffers from information overload the 24/7 explosion from our computers, smartphones, media, colleagues, and customers. Information is essential to making intelligent decisions, but more often than not, it simply overwhelms us. It's like trying to drink from a fire hose. The question isn't how to stop all those e-mails, meetings, conference calls, and fat reports; that's impossible. The question is what to do with them. How do you find the truly essential nuggets of information and use them with confidence? The solution proposed by Christopher Frank and Paul Magnone sounds deceptively simple: Learn how to ask the right questions at the right time. Whatever field you're in, asking smarter questions will expose you to new information, point you to connections between seemingly unrelated facts, and open new avenues of discussion with your colleagues. The authors explain the seven questions that can help you bring a big- picture perspective to problems that often leave others buried in irrelevant details. And they show through real-life case studies- including Trader Joe's, Starbucks, Kodak, Microsoft, iRobot, and IBM-how their method can have a dramatic impact. It really is possible to convert the fire hose of information into useful insights. Consider a nonbusiness example: the 2010 Icelandic volcano eruption that sent a giant ash cloud toward Europe. Tens of thousands of flights were canceled and five million passengers stranded, leading to billions in economic losses. Europe's best scientists generated oceans of data and carefully modeled the cloud's dispersion pattern. But no one could answer the essential question: Was the concentration of volcanic ash in the air enough to damage a jet engine? Without that key answer, all the carefully gathered facts were useless to the decision makers. Once you adopt the seven questions, you'll start having more productive brainstorming sessions. You'll answer critical questions faster and find unexpected solutions to important problems. And you'll get better at communicating to your colleagues with more clarity and focus, turning down the fire hose that other people have to cope with.
With an easy three-step plan, Mindful Drinking: How To Break Up With Alcohol is here to help the 64% of Brits who want to drink less, and cultivate a new, healthy and more mindful relationship with alcohol. You CAN drink less, without giving up! Journalist Rosamund Dean combines scientific expertise with practical advice in a game-changing three step guide: The Problem, The Incentive, and The Plan. By following this guide you will be able to experience the benefits of drinking less - drinking less will improve your mood, your skin, your sex-drive and your body as well as reduce stress and anxiety. Whether you are sober-curious, or just want to cut down - Mindful Drinking: How To Break Up With Alcohol shows not only why you should, but also how you can, in a way that will change your life forever. What readers have been saying about Mindful Drinking: How to Break Up With Alcohol: 'Brilliant book; realistic and creating real positive change' 'Would highly recommend for anyone who is concerned about the amount they drink, but doesn't want to completely stop.' 'A brilliantly straightforward and realistic approach to cutting down sensibly.' 'Really broke a cycle for me of just drinking every weekend.'
Using a Critical Incidents approach, 600 drivers were called upon to identify the bases of decisions to drink and drive. In an unstructured interview, each driver descnbed the bases for decisions leading to specific instances of impaired driving, including decisions regarding participation in drinking events, transportation to events, plans prior to and following initiation of drinking, activities while drinking, leaving the drinking event, and transportation following drinking. Over 12,000 individual decision bases were descended. While the bases were highly specific to the individual decisions, those involving the social environment exerted the strongest influence, followed in decreasing order by influences of a personal nature, the occasion giving rise to drinking, economic considerations, plans already made, and usual patterns of behavior. Results evidenced the need for 1) friends, hosts and sellers of alcohol to avoid inadvertent encouragement to over-consumption of alcohol and driving while impaired, 2) better planning in providing alternatives to drinking as well as driving, and 3) helping drinkers and those around them to redefine what they perceive as their "responsibilities" with respect to situations leading to alcohol impaired driving.
Substance use and substance use disorders (SUDs) have been documented in a number of cultures since the beginnings of recorded time and represent major societal concerns in the present day. The Oxford Handbook of Substance Use and Substance Use Disorders provides comprehensive reviews of key areas of inquiry into the fundamental nature of substance use and SUDs, their features, causes, consequences, course, treatment, and prevention. It is clear that understanding these various aspects of substance use and SUDs requires a multidisciplinary perspective that considers the pharmacology of drugs of abuse, genetic variation in these acute and chronic effects, and psychological processes in the context of the interpersonal and cultural contexts. Comprising two volumes, this Handbook also highlights a range of opportunities and challenges facing those interested in the basic understanding of the nature of these phenomena and novel approaches to assess, prevent, and treat these conditions with the goal of reducing the enormous burden these problems place on our global society. Chapters in Volume 1 cover the historical and cultural contexts of substance use and its consequences, its epidemiology and course, etiological processes from the perspective of neuropharmacology, genetics, personality, development, motivation, and the interpersonal and larger social environment. Chapters in Volume 2 cover major health and social consequences of substance involvement, psychiatric comorbidity, assessment, and interventions. Each chapter highlights key issues in the respective topic area and raises unanswered questions for future research. All chapters are authored by leading scholars in each topic. The level of coverage is sufficiently deep to be of value to both trainees and established scientists and clinicians interested in an evidenced-based approach.
