First Access conference a success!

On April 12, 2006, over 270 tobacco prevention professionals, educators, school administrators, law enforcement, researchers, and health professionals came together in Seattle, Washington to work on the challenging issue of youth access to tobacco. The major focus of the conference was the emerging issue of social sources of tobacco for underage youth.

After a decade or more youth access enforcement, communities all across the U.S. and Canada now regularly work to educate their tobacco retailers and conduct ongoing compliance checks to ensure that youth are not able to purchase tobacco. The good news is that in most communities these efforts are working and kids themselves are reporting that it is more difficult to purchase their own tobacco. The bad news is that kids are now obtaining tobacco from social sources such as their friends and family at higher rates than ever before.

Because we found the social source issue to be an unexplored area throughout the United States and Canada, we felt that it was crucial that we turn part of the conference into a working summit to begin the work on this difficult problem.

Day One: Social Source Summit

Day one began with an opening plenary panel discussion focused on where we are today with preventing youth access to tobacco and how social sources plays a major role in youth access. One key part of this presentation was about the growing realization that our messages in the youth access prevention field are too close to the messages being pushed by tobacco companies. You can download the Powerpoint presentation or read more about this topic on the blog. Following the panel attendees broke into small workgroups to brainstorm ideas about how to deal with the emerging issue of social sources becoming the main way youth gain access to tobacco. These groups not only helped with gaining insight from all backgrounds of tobacco prevention and control, but also got the attendees talking to one another and helped to make the entire conference more enjoyable for many attendees. Find out what the workgroups said.

Day Two & Three: Youth Access Conference

A more standard conference format followed the day one's social sources summit with former Mississippi Attorney General, Michael Moore opening day two with an emotional and uplifting keynote presentation. Following Michael Moore, two local youth groups, Powerful Voices and Youth Speaks took stage and wowed the attendees with their informative skit and moving spoken work performance. Although some of the youth performance was shocking and eye opening, it is simply what youth deal with on a daily basis. To fully understand youth, we must work to understand where they come from and what factors influence their lives. This was something the workgroups affirmed.

The remainder of Access 2006 included breakout sessions with panel presenters from all across North America. Sessions covered everything from school based education and cessation, Synar successes, retailer education, innovative policy development, and social source research and interventions. You can download many of the presentations here.