ALL TOGETHER

Here's A Direction In Which Anti-drinking Efforts Might
Head.

Holy Toledo! That should be the rallying cry for the efforts to
address teenage drinking that are beginning to bubble up around Concord.

Toledo is the hometown of the Lucas County Community Prevention
Partnership, a coalition of 50 local groups as diverse as the Toledo
YMCA, the Maumee city schools, the Lucas County Sheriff's Office, the
Catholic Diocese, St. Luke's Hospital and Arnie's Saloon.

Founded in 1996, the coalition is dedicated to education, training and
advocacy geared toward preventing substance abuse by the young and
adults. It has a staff of seven committed to supporting a range of
programming associated with schools, the police and the courts, even
prenatal care for pregnant women. Their goals are broad, addressing
smoking, for example, as well as alcohol abuse.

The group is financed largely by local governments and grants, and in
turn pays for such activities as training store clerks, buying ID
scanners and hiring police officers for community festivals where
alcohol is sold.

The partnership's youth to youth committee involves more than 40
students from area junior high and high schools. A coalition panel
recently completed an annual report identifying changes that should be
made in the county's approach to underage alcohol use - meaningful
changes derived not from think-tank boilerplate but from an
understanding of local circumstances.

Certainly this effort is taking place on a larger scale than is likely
in Concord, which, after all, is a smaller community.

But the concerns that have impelled the Ohio effort are little
different from those felt here. For example, almost half of Lucas
County stores failed a spot check and sold liquor to underage
customers; the figure in Concord was just a bit higher.

The result of the Concord spot check was one factor among many that
have combined to heighten concern about teen drinking. Tuesday night,
a parent-teacher group held a forum on the issue that drew more than
50 people. City officials and the Riverbend mental health center are
working on the issue, too.

These efforts are many long steps short of the mature, comprehensive
programming in place in Lucas County. But they are a promising
development, and those responsible for it could benefit from studying
the Lucas County example.

One conclusion that might flow from such a study is that prevention
efforts will work best if the various groups pursuing them work
together. A second might be that the very existence of a broad-based,
active community coalition sends a strong message about underage
drinking to businesses, kids and parents.

A third might be recognizing that teen drinking is a problem without
borders. As encouraging as it is to see the seeds of progress on this
issue in Concord, consider the growth that would be possible if this
became a countywide effort - or a regional one.