The July 1 deadline is approaching to register at reduced rates for the 18th International Conference on Alcohol, Drugs and Traffic Safety, T2007, to be held in Seattle, WA, USA, August 26th-30th, 2007. This will be ICADTS' first joint conference with The International Association of Forensic Toxicologists (TIAFT), and will provide a spotlight on the toxicology of alcohol, drugs and traffic safety, while retaining all the normal topic areas for ICADTS meetings. In addition, the Annual Ignition Interlock Symposium will also be part of T2007. Please visit the T2007 website, at: www.T2007.org. The website contains conference registration information and expanded material on the social program and the various tours that are included in the registration fee that will be conducted on Tuesday afternoon. The conference is being held in the Seattle Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center - a newly renovated world class meeting space (hotel reservations at the conference rate must be booked through the T2007 website, on the 'hotel' tab). More than two thirds of the rooms have already been booked. Attendance is going to be larger than most TIAFT and ICADTS meetings, so to ensure your room at the conference rate, book online now.
The abstract deadline passed on March 31st, 2007, and the response was overwhelming - over 400 abstracts have been received from more than 40 different countries. The abstracts have been sent for review, and authors will be notified of the scientific committee's decisions within the next few weeks. If you submitted an abstract and have not received a receipt, please contact: abstractsT2007@wsp.wa.gov. The Ignition Interlock Symposium schedule is also being finalized. The entire scientific program will be posted to the web site at the end of May, and you are encouraged to check the web site for updates
The quality and topics that are represented by these submissions, which coupled with the excellent social program will make T2007 a must attend event for professionals in alcohol drug and traffic safety, and forensic toxicology fields. The social program features receptions at the Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Flight, one of the world's top collections showing the history and development of human flight. The meeting will be capped off with the annual awards banquet. There will be a choice of several tours on Tuesday afternoon for delegates to various sites in the Pacific Northwest. Preliminary information on the tour options and the rest of the program is available on the web site.
Subject areas at the conference include impaired driving, human performance toxicology, analytical methods, any aspect of alcohol, drugs and traffic safety including experimental studies of the effects of alcohol and/or drugs on driving, approaches to detecting drugged drivers, oral fluid technology, detection limits and device performance, demographics of drunk and drugged drivers, roadside surveys of alcohol and drug use, sobriety checkpoints, enforcement of DWI-DUID laws, alcohol ignition interlocks, rehabilitation, characteristics of offenders, prevention activities, epidemiological studies, and other related topics. The organizers look forward to welcoming you to Seattle.
ICADTS will present a series of awards at an Awards Banquet at the 18th International Conference on Alcohol, Drugs and Traffic Safety in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on August 29, 2007. The prestigious Individual Widmark Award, and the gold medal that accompanies the award, will be presented to Professor Robert M. Solomon, Professor of Law, University of Western Ontario, Canada. Professor Solomon has been Canada's pre-eminent legal scholar in the field of substance abuse law and policy since the 1980s. He has worked tirelessly as a researcher, educator and public advocate, seeking legislative reforms to reduce alcohol and drug-related harm.
In addition, the Indiana University Center for Studies of Law in Action will be awarded the Institutional Widmark Award, given to outstanding non-governmental organizations that have contributed to the advancement of science in our field. The Center was established in 1970 by Professor Robert F. Borkenstein, a long-term member, leader, and supporter of ICADTS. The Center has performed outstanding services in research, education, and public and professional information in the field of alcohol, drugs and traffic safety for the past 37 years.
The Widmark Awards were established in 1965 in honor of Professor Erik M. P. Widmark of the University of Lund in western Sweden, whose comprehensive research work during the first half of this century touched on all the aspects of the pharmacology of alcohol. It is the highest honor that ICADTS can confer on individuals and organizations that have made outstanding contributions to our basic knowledge of the effects of alcohol and other mood-altering drugs on traffic safety.
ICADTS will also present the Haddon Award for only the third time. The award will be presented to Barry Sweedler, former president of ICADTS. He has been selected for this honor for his many years of work to improve transportation safety, especially with respect to drug and alcohol use. During his more than 30 year career with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, Mr. Sweedler worked to identify important safety issues in all modes of transportation both in the U.S. and worldwide, develop and recommend solutions to those problems, and advocate and actively support the implementation of these solutions.
The Haddon Award, established by ICADTS in 1999, recognizes those who have advocated scientifically based changes to public policy which have reduced the adverse effects of alcohol or other drugs on traffic safety. The award is named in honor of Dr. William Haddon, Jr., a physician and epidemiologist, and a pioneer in the highway safety field. As a researcher and administrator, he contributed substantially to the development and application of effective methods to reduce motor vehicle injuries by insisting that the field be based on science.
The names of the previous winners of the Widmark and Haddon Awards can be found on the ICADTS website: www.icadts.org.
A new study by Barry Watson and James Freeman of the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety-Queensland (CARRS-Q), Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Carseldine, Australia, explored the impact of random breath testing (RBT) on the attitudes, perceptions, and self-reported behavior of motorists in the Australian state of Queensland. Particular attention was given to how exposure to RBT impacted motorists' perceived risk of apprehension and self-reported behavior, relative to other variables of interest such as alcohol consumption. The study involved a telephone survey of 780 motorists drawn from throughout the state of Queensland. The analysis indicated that a large proportion of the sample had both observed RBT and been breath tested within the last six months and believed the practice served an important role in improving road safety. However, a considerable percentage also reported drunk driving at least once in the last six months without being detected, with further analysis indicating that the threat of apprehension associated with RBT did not appear to greatly influence their offending behavior. Rather, a higher frequency of alcohol consumption, combined with more favorable attitudes to drunk driving and lower levels of support for RBT, appeared to be associated with offending behavior. It was concluded that while the results confirm the high levels of exposure to RBT achieved in Queensland, the direct impact of recent exposure on drunk driving behavior appears less important than other factors such as alcohol consumption and attitudes to drunk driving and RBT. Further research is required to better understand how recent and lifetime exposure to RBT impacts on motorists' perceived risk of apprehension and subsequent drunk driving behavior. The study appeared in Traffic Injury Prevention, Volume 8, Issue 1, 2007.
In New Mexico (USA), between July 1999 and December 2002, the installation of an ignition interlock was an optional judicial sanction for second and third driving-while-impaired (DWI) offenders. This is a study of the recidivism of 437 offenders who were convicted and installed interlocks for an average of 322 days during that period. The comparison group was a stratified random sample (N = 12,554) of the 20,949 offenders who were convicted during the same period but did not install interlocks. DWI arrest and conviction data for all study participants were received from the Motor Vehicle Department's Citation Tracking System. It was found that only 11 (2.5%) of the interlock offender group were rearrested for DWI while interlocks were installed, whereas 1,017 (8.1%) of the comparison group were rearrested during an equivalent 322-day period. Survival graphs and Cox proportional hazard regression analyses were used to compare the interlock and noninterlock groups during installation, after installation, and for the entire period up to December 2004.
Results indicate a reduction in recidivism of 65% during installation. After removal, there was no significant difference in recidivism rates in a 3-year follow-up period. Following all offenders for 4 years, including both the period while the interlock was installed and the period after its removal, indicates that the difference in recidivism achieved during installation, though not increased, is maintained, so at the end of 4 years, interlock users still have lower total recidivism than nonusers. The magnitude of interlock effectiveness reported here is similar to those in other published studies with comparable samples. The study was conducted by Richard Roth of Impact DWI and Robert Voas and Paul Marques of Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation and appeared in Traffic Injury Prevention, Volume 8, Issue 1, 2007.
To mitigate the high risk of motor vehicle crashes for young beginning drivers, more than 40 states and the District of Columbia have implemented graduated driver licensing (GDL) systems that gradually and systematically ease teen drivers into higher risk driving conditions. Evaluations of GDL programs using motor vehicle crash data have demonstrated marked declines in crashes. A study in Traffic Injury Prevention (Vol. 8, No. 1) examined the association between the implementation of the North Carolina (USA) GDL program and the rate of hospitalization, as well as hospital charges, for 16-and 17-year-old drivers. Data were obtained from the North Carolina Hospital Discharge Database for the 26 months before and 46 months after the December 1, 1997, implementation of the GDL program. Among the 568 16-year-old hospitalized drivers, GDL was associated with a 36.5% decline in the hospitalization rate per population and a 31.2% decline in the total monthly driver hospitalization charges. Although a 12% reduction in the rate of hospitalizations was observed among the 615 17-year-old drivers, the analysis lacked sufficient power to be statistically reliable. No consistent change was observed in the 16-year-old driver total monthly hospital charges. It was concluded that the North Carolina GDL program was associated with a marked decline in the rate of hospitalizations and hospital charges for 16-year-old drivers. Following the implementation of GDL, over $650,000 in hospital charges have been averted each year for 16-year-old drivers. Analyses suggest these reductions were primarily the result of reduced exposure rather than an improvement in teen driving. The authors of the study were Lewis H. Margolis, Scott V. Masten and Robert D. Foss of the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center. Margolis is also affiliated with the Department of Maternal and Child Health.
The presentations giving at the 2006 conference of the International Traffic Medicine Association held in Melbourne, Australia October 15-17, 2006 are now available on DVD. To obtain a copy of the DVD contact Dr. Morris Odell (morriso@vifm.org) at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, the host of the conference. There is a small fee to cover production and postage.
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has updated and reprinted its brochure entitled, The Nation's Top Strategies to Stop Impaired Driving. The strategies include high visibility enforcement, support for prosecutors and DWI courts, alcohol screening and brief intervention and primary seat belt laws. To view the brochure, go to http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/injury/alcohol/StrategiesStopID/index.html.
A study accepted for publication by Addiction evaluates health outcomes following an alcohol ignition interlock programme by assessing hospital care utilization and sick-leave register data relative to controls with revoked licences, but with no comparable opportunity to participate in an interlock programme. In Sweden, driving while impaired (DWI) offenders can now select voluntarily a 2-year interlock programme in lieu of 12 months' licence revocation. The interlock programme includes regular medical check-ups designed to alter alcohol use. The control group (865 individuals) showed increased hospital care and sick leave after licence revocation following the DWI. Among the 1,266 people in the interlock programme, however, significantly fewer needed hospital care relative to controls, and relative to their own care utilization before the DWI offence. This occurred whether care reflected all diagnosis or only alcohol-related diagnosis. Also, sick-leave data showed significantly fewer individuals in the interlcok programme using sick leave relative to the control group, and relative to their own pre-treatment period. These significant health benefits disappear in the post-treatment period. However, among those who actually do complete the entire interlock programme, sustained positive health effects are observed 3 and 4 years after the DWI offence. The study concludes that voluntary participation in an interlock programme has favourable effects with less need for hospital care or sick leave. This is probably linked to reduced alcohol consumption during the programme and to the ability to continue driving. The study was authored by Bo Bjerre, Paul Marques, Jan Selén and U. Thorsson.
A study published in Lancet (February 10, 2007) examined alcohol misuse and traffic crashes in Italy. Alcohol-impaired driving poses a serious threat to health around the world. In the USA, despite the significant reduction in alcohol-related traffic crashes in the past two decades, 40% of traffic deaths and 9% of traffic injuries are alcohol-related. Similarly, in the European Union, 30-50% of traffic crashes are related to alcohol intake. A prospective study that enrolled 2354 patients admitted to an Italian emergency department for an injury caused by a traffic crash showed that the blood alcohol concentration was above the legal limit (0.5 g/L) in 25.7% of them. Also, the proportion of patients over the limit increased progressively (from 14.4% to 30.8%) with trauma severity, and almost 30% of patients with multiple trauma were over the limit. Alcohol misuse still remains a paramount risk factor for hospital admission due to road crashes, and physicians have an opportunity for intervention in this setting: a single warning to avoid alcohol intake before driving can reduce physical injuries and the associated medical costs caused by this risk. The authors of the study are F. Caputo, F. Trevisani, and M. Bernardi.
A Norwegian study looked at the effects of THC on driving skills. Delta (9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the most important psychoactive substance in cannabis, is frequently detected in blood from apprehended drivers suspected for drugged driving. Both experimental and epidemiological studies have demonstrated the negative effects of THC upon cognitive functions and psychomotor skills. These effects could last longer than a measurable concentration of THC in blood. Culpability studies have recently demonstrated an increased risk of becoming responsible in fatal or injurious traffic accidents, even with low blood concentrations of THC. It has also been demonstrated that there is a correlation between the degree of impairment, the drug dose and the THC blood concentration. The study was conducted by Hassan Z. Khiabani, Asbjørg S. Christophersen and Jørg Mørland from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. It appeared in Tidsskr Nor Laegeforen, Vol. 127, No. 5.
The purpose of the study that appeared in Rev Saude Publica (Vol. 41, No. 2, 2007) was to assess the incidence of alcohol and amphetamine use among long-distance truck drivers. Data were collected from 91 truck drivers at the gas station in Passos, Southeastern Brazil, in November 2005. Data included a questionnaire comprising 19 multiple choice questions. The results indicated that 66% of the long-distance truck drivers reported using amphetamines during their travels, mainly at gas stations along the highways (54%). Alcohol was consumed by 91% of them and 43% of them consumed it at gas stations. It is concluded that there is a need of preventive and education campaigns targeting this occupation category at gas stations and transportation companies, focusing on the risks of these substances use during working hours. The study was authored by E. C. Nascimento, E. Nascimento and P. Silva.
A Circular entitled Traffic Safety and Alcohol Regulation will be published by the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the U.S. National Academies. The Circular will include background papers and summaries of the discussion at a workshop organized by the TRB Committee on Alcohol, Other Drugs and Transportation in June of 2006. The publication is edited by the Committee Chair, Kathryn Stewart. It discusses the various ways that control of alcohol sales, service, and promotion can have an impact on traffic safety. Examples are included from around the world regarding strategies such as alcohol price controls, minimum purchase age laws, limits on outlet location, limits on hours of sale and service, dram shop and social host liability, and enforcement programs. The draft Circular will be posted soon on the ICADTS website.
Alcohol-control policies such as the minimum legal drinking age and raising beer taxes have both helped prevent traffic fatalities among youth, a recent study shows. Each of these policies has an impact and the impact is strongest when fewer alcohol regulations are currently in place. The study concludes that communities with few alcohol regulations could consider raising taxes on beer as a way to reduce drunken driving fatalities among young people. These communities could expect the greatest benefits from establishing new alcohol-control policies.
Researchers examined traffic crash data gathered from 48 U.S. states from 1975 to 2001. Results showed that raising either the drinking age or beer taxes alone led to fewer youth-traffic fatalities. The reductions in fatalities from raising the drinking age were most dramatic when beer taxes were low. Similarly, beer taxes had the most dramatic impact on youth fatalities in states and years where it was legal for youth to buy and consume beer. The findings suggest that some of the varying results in past research regarding the impact of alcohol policies may indicate that a given public policy may not have the same effectiveness in all places and times. Specifically, a given policy change, such as a 10-percent beer-tax increase, may not give the same effects when implemented in different situations. The main study author is William R. Ponicki of the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, California. Results are published in the May issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
June 10-15, 2007
ICAA's 50th International Conference on Dependencies - Stockholm, Sweden
Visit: http://www.icaaconference.se/icaac for information.
June 14-15, 2007
2nd Fit to Drive Congress: Reality and Vision - Common problems, European Solutions - Vienna, Austria
Visit: www.fit-to-drive.com for program and registration info.
August 26-31, 2007
T'2007 - 18th International Conference on Alcohol, Drugs and Traffic Safety - Seattle, Washington, United States
Sponsored by ICADTS, The International Association of Forensic Toxicologists and the Ignition Interlock Symposium.
Visit www.ICADTS2007.org for information.
September 3-5, 2007
Changing Lanes - Road Safety Summit - Halmstad, Sweden
For information about the Tylösand Conference, contact www.tylosandconference.com.
December 2-7, 2007
The Robert F. Borkenstein Course on Alcohol and Highway Safety: Testing, Research and Litigation
Contact: Center for Studies of Law in Action, Indiana Univ. Tel: 812-855-1783, Fax: 812-855-7542, Email: dlindsay@indiana.edu.
Visit www.indiana.edu/~lawactn for information.