In Focus: Raising awareness of prescription drug abuse
Prescription drug abuse is the fastest-growing addiction problem in the nation, according to experts. In Western New York, an estimated 1 in 5 young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 is either dependent on or abusing prescription painkillers. More …
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More states focusing on prescription drug problem
Avi Israel has been a frequent and vocal advocate since 2011 for tackling the growing problem of prescription drug abuse, including testimony in 2012 before the U.S. Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control. His advocacy helped lead to New York …
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Kansas vs. Missouri in debate over prescription drug abuse
In the Show Me State, according to the group HealthyAmericans.org, the number of deaths mostly related to prescription drug use has tripled since 1999. The state has the seventh highest drug overdose mortality rate in the United States, with 17 per 100 …
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Enzymatic pathway common to drugs of abuse could lead to new treatment options
The extracellular-signal regulated kinase (ERK) pathway plays a role in multiple drug addictions and appears to modulate neuronal plasticity through epigenetic mechanisms, say French scientists. The discovery could pave the way for new therapeutic …
Read more on Eureka! Science News

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The idea of targeting and erasing select memories has long been a prominent trope in sci-fi, seen in movies like 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' and 'Superman II,' and literature like Philip K. Dick's 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale …
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Addiction Treatment Resources Available Online
The Serene Directory of Addiction Treatment Resources and information is now available online at www.SereneDirectory.com. This is a web-based directory of services for the United States and Canada. It allows for free contact listings in one of 22 …
Read more on Gazette Newspapers

Alibaug 'rehab centre' has no licence, experts to treat drug addicts
The founder of a de-addiction centre near Alibaug, where patients were kept in appalling conditions and "tortured", does not have a licence or a qualified medical team to run a rehab clinic, it emerged on Sunday. Addiction is considered a mental …
Read more on Mumbai Mirror

Manchin, Hagan Lobbied To Support One-Year Obamacare Delay
One of the more positive sounding admonitions from health care reform opponents was that the United States had "the best health care in the world," so why would you mess with it? Well, it's true that if you want the …. Since the law contains dual …
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Drug Rehab Center Aubrey Develops New Treatment Programs for Young Adults
Drug Rehab Center Aubrey is a fully accredited alcohol and drug treatment facility in Aubrey, Texas. Aubrey, TX (PRWEB) September 28, 2013. Drug and alcohol addiction can happen to any age group. But the methods of treatment aren't necessarily the same …
Read more on PR Web (press release)

Drug Rehab Center Piscataway Develops New Treatment Programs for the Elderly
Drug Rehab Center Piscataway has implemented comprehensive dual diagnosis and pain management programs to help seniors deal with their addictions. While most young addicts use drugs and alcohol to get high or buzzed, senior substance abuse is …
Read more on Newsday

Social Innovation Fellows Class of 2012

Image by ChimpLearnGood
FELLOWS

Jamila Abass – MFarm
As CEO of MFarm, Jamila Abass uses mobile technology to help farmers increase their incomes. MFarm provides farmers in Kenya with real-time market price information and a group selling platform where they can connect with other farmers to jointly market their crops in greater volumes. By giving rural farmers more direct and powerful access to buyers, MFarm is positioned to improve hundreds of thousands – and potentially millions – of lives.
www.mfarm.co.ke/

Lukas Biewald – CrowdFlower
Lukas Biewald is CEO and founder of CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing internet company that breaks large digital projects into small microtasks and distributes them to workers around the world. CrowdFlower engages a workforce of nearly 3.5 million people to complete more than 2 million tasks every day. In a key example, Biewald helped PopTech Science Fellow Sarah Fortune find new ways to study the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. By sharing the workload, making it fun and insisting on quality results, CrowdFlower provides incomes while speeding the path toward more accurate and scalable results.
crowdflower.com/

Rachel Brown – Sisi ni Amani – Kenya
Rachel Brown founded Sisi ni Amani – Kenya ("We are Peace – Kenya" in Swahili) to pioneer the use of mobile technology to get the right communication capacity into the hands of local peacebuilders, enabling communities to participate in democratic processes and prevent violence. Through civic education, engagement and dialogue, SNA-K leverages SMS text messaging to support the peace efforts of community leaders. As a key partner in the collaborative PeaceTXT project, SNA-K is working to make locally effective tools that can be replicated globally in stopping violence and building peace.
sisiniamani.org/

Bryan Doerries – Outside the Wire
Bryan Doerries is the founder of Theater of War, a project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to service members, veterans, caregivers and families to help them start talking about the challenges faced by military communities today. He is also the co-founder of Outside the Wire, LLC, a social impact company that uses theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health issues, such as combat-related psychological injury, end of life care, prison reform, political violence and torture, and the de-stigmatization of the treatment of substance abuse and addiction. A self-described evangelist for classical literature and its relevance to our lives today, Doerries uses age-old approaches to help heal very modern wounds.
www.outsidethewirellc.com/

Toure McCluskey – OkCopay
Toure McCluskey is the founder of OkCopay, a unique search engine for medical procedures that helps Americans with inadequate insurance find affordable local health care. At OkCopay, people can quickly search for the procedure they need, compare local providers, and view actual provider prices and details on the appropriate health clinic. By bringing transparency to healthcare costs, OkCopay is ensuring that those most in need can find effective and reasonable health services.
www.okcopay.com/

Nicholas Merrill – Calyx Institute
Nicholas Merrill created the Calyx Institute to help launch a telecommunications and Internet service provider focused on the right to privacy and freedom of expression. Merrill has personally fought intrusive government demands for private customer information, and he aims to develop, document and publicly release technology to enable private communications that even the service provider cannot decode or eavesdrop upon. Merrill’s goal is to inhibit mass surveillance and to protect the privacy and security of users everywhere.
www.facebook.com/calyxinstitute

Jacobo Quintanilla – Internews
Jacobo Quintanilla joined Internews to bring news and information resources to people in humanitarian crises. As Director of Humanitarian Information Projects, Quintanilla has helped create a two-way dialogue between aid workers and affected communities in countries such as Haiti, Central African Republic and Kenya. Building on Internews’ core mission, Quintanilla’s projects empower local media in crisis situations to give people the news and information they need, the ability to connect, and the means to make their voices heard.
internews.org/

Andreas Raptopoulos – Matternet
Andreas Raptopoulos is the founder and CEO of Matternet, building a network of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to transport medicine and goods in places with poor road infrastructure. Matternet’s "drones for good" use small, electric UAVs to transport packages weighing up to 2 kilos and containing items like vaccines, medicines or blood samples, over distances of 10 kilometers at a time. By creating a new paradigm for transportation that leapfrogs roads, Matternet is helping to revolutionize transportation in the developing world.
matternet.us/

Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan – Global Financial Inclusion Initiative
As director of the Global Financial Inclusion Initiative at Yale University and Innovations for Poverty Action, Aishwarya Ratan focuses on the design and delivery of effective financial services for the poor. GFII seeks to test, evaluate and replicate interventions to improve products, delivery channels and tools ranging from savings products to mobile money and financial literacy programs. The initiative’s rigorous approach to testing and measuring the impact of such innovations aims to ensure that the financial services available to the poor to manage and grow their money are affordable, efficient, secure and welfare-enhancing.
www.poverty-action.org/financialinclusion

Eric Stowe – A Child’s Right / Splash
Eric Stowe believes that every child has a right to clean water—and he has built an innovative, scalable approach to act on that belief. Since founding A Child’s Right (soon to be Splash) in 2006, Stowe has developed a highly effective model to ensure safe water for urban children living at the intersection of these two streets: “greatest degrees of poverty” and “worst water quality conditions.” Leveraging world-class water purification technology, sustainable monitoring and maintenance, excellent people, and a rigorous commitment to transparency, A Child’s Right will soon announce that every orphanage in China has safe drinking water. Stowe’s team will then demonstrate how they are customizing their approach for 15 more countries in Asia and East Africa, using their "Proving It" platform to share both successes and failures at all of their project sites.
achildsright.org/

Eric Woods – Switchboard
Eric Woods is the CEO and founder of Switchboard, which uses mobile phones to create nationwide networks of health workers in developing countries. Switchboard partners with mobile operators to provide health workers with free nationwide calling, a nationwide registry and access to information via bulk text messaging. Having already linked all doctors in both Ghana and Liberia, Switchboard will next connect health workers at all levels throughout Tanzania, working toward the vision of a collaborative network of health advice, referrals and improved care in places where access is most challenging.
www.switchboard.org/

Daniel Zoughbie – Microclinic International
Daniel Zoughbie created Microclinic International to help leverage the power of social network relationships to spread healthy behaviors throughout under-resourced communities. Working in Jordan, India, Kenya, the West Bank and the United States, Microclinic International has begun to show that working through existing social groups of friends and family can significantly help people improve their outcomes in the fight against such diseases as diabetes and HIV/AIDS. The effectiveness of their approach is attracting attention from governments and other large-scale health providers, opening the door to large-scale replication and the broader use of this "contagious health" approach.
microclinics.org/

Christie and wife honored at gala for drug treatment center
SOMERSET — Eleven years ago, Craig Hanlon was invited to speak to teenagers about how he overcame a crack addiction, thanks to the residential treatment program at Daytop Village in Mendham. "I went there with the hope that somehow I could touch …
Read more on The Star-Ledger – NJ.com

Report: Aldon Smith To Be Treated For Substance Abuse After Today's Game
Chris Mortensen reports that "a consensus" has been reached regarding 49ers linebacker Aldon Smith, who crashed his car Friday morning, allegedly failed a breathalyzer, and allegedly had pills and weed in his possession at the time of the crash: Smith …
Read more on Deadspin

Rehab centers struggle to keep drugs out
Ehrhart says she witnessed a drug deal at the rehab center and told a staff member, who failed to report it. In an e-mail to Ehrhart's mother, Betty Ford's former CEO John Schwarzlose, who left the post in July, promised an investigation, offered the …
Read more on USA TODAY

Four beds ready to treat Internet addicts
Some, they say, will need to be medicated to make it through the detox. "We're really behind other countries in treating this problem," says Young. "China, Korea and Taiwan all have treatment centers. Here in the United States, people who need …
Read more on CNN

Actor Says Stay At Detox Center Helped With Painkiller Addiction
When Actor Michael Sorrentino had an issue with prescription drugs he sought help at a detox center. Fortunately, there are certified drug treatment centers such as South Florida's Harbor Village where abusers can seek the professional assistance they …
Read more on PR Web (press release)

Health law could overwhelm addiction services
Only 1 cent of every health care dollar in the United States goes toward addiction, and few alcoholics and drug addicts receive treatment. One huge barrier, according to many experts, has been a lack of health insurance. But that barrier crumbles in …
Read more on Corvallis Gazette Times

Human service center loses substance abuse treatment license
Human service center loses substance abuse treatment license. JAMESTOWN – South Central Human Service Center's license to provide substance abuse treatment will be suspended starting Monday, leaving some people unsure how to continue treatment.
Read more on Dickinson Press

Funding cuts to drug treatment centers mean addicts get turned away
But there isn't enough subsidized care for the uninsured who need to be admitted on a longer-term basis, said Amy Blount, the program supervisor for a methadone clinic in Greenville, part of a chain of private mental health and addiction treatment …
Read more on News & Observer