The annual meeting for representatives of local governments was opened by Mr Jarosław Pinkas, Secretary of State in the Ministry of Health.
The aims of the conference were the following: presenting new publications concerning the European Drug Prevention Quality Standards (EDPQS), which will be released in Poland. The three EDPQS toolkits have been translated into Polish by the MCPS and will be available in October this year.
During the session devoted to the EDPQS, an MCPS representative discussed the new publications by the Prevention Standards Partnership (http://prevention-standards.eu/), while an Italian expert presented the EDPQS training toolkit. In Italy, the European Standards have been applied in university education. Moreover, representatives of the city of Malmo, Sweden discussed the implementation of the standards under the Tricity project. The Lithuanian expert outlined the progress of the implementation of the EDPQS and presented results of the evaluation of EDPQS training, which had been conducted by a Polish Reitox Focal Point staff member in Vilnius at the end of June this year (for more information go to http://www.cinn.gov.pl/portal?id=1030573).
Information on the situation of drugs and drug addiction in their home countries was also presented by the experts from Georgia and Ukraine while the Polish speakers discussed issues related to the Act of 15 September 2015 on public health and National Health Programme (Ministry of Health, Municipal Office of the City of Wrocław). Moreover, speakers from the cities of Wrocław, Pabianice and Płock presented activities of local governments in the field of drug prevention.
Additionally, during this year’s meeting, the representative of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction presented two EMCDDA reports. One was devoted to the situation of drugs while the other discussed drug policies in large cities. The former report is available in the Polish version at the EMCDDA’s website: http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/edr/trends-developments/2016.
During the session devoted to recommended drug prevention programmes a new website (http://programyrekomendowane.pl) launched by the National Bureau was shown. Conclusions from the 3rd National Conference entitled “Drugs – Drug Addiction. Policy, Science and Practice” were presented. The conference, organized in June this year by the National Bureau for Drug Prevention and Polish Foundation for Humanitarian Aid Res Humanae, was targeted on local government officials. The system of recommended drug prevention programmes has been operational in Poland since 2010 and is the result of the collaboration of four institutions: National Bureau for Drug Prevention, State Agency for the Prevention of Alcohol-Related Problems, Centre for Education Development as well as Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology.
One of the last conference sessions featured the presentation of the Warsaw Declaration, which had been developed during the 2nd International Urban Drug Policies Conference (UDPC2016) organized in February this year in Warsaw by the Polish Drug Policy Network, Municipal Office of the City of Warsaw and National Bureau for Drug Prevention (http://urbandrugpolicies.com/pl/).
