Editorial Comment 4/21/2020: A party, and a surfing metaphor

In Hawaii, we had a teaching party this past week.

Okay, in truth, we have one each year, about this time (April-June); which we choose to call, unsurprisingly, the Hawai`i Addiction Conference, or HAC. This has been an annual event in Honolulu from the inception of the University of Hawai`i addiction psychiatry and addiction medicine fellowships in 1998, the first such fellowships west of the Mississippi. Very far west of the Mississippi.  Some of the speakers you will recognize immediately, others perhaps not now but more so in the near future:  Drs. Tim Fong and Tom Freese of UCLA; Hawaii Lieutenant-Governor Josh Green, M.D.; Hawaii Deputy Health Director for Behavioral Health Eddie Mersereau; LCSW; HSAM President and Clinical Professor Gerry McKenna; Addiction Medicine Fellow and Assistant Professor of Medicine Dr. Miki Kiyokawa;  Steven Kemble M.D., past President of the Hawaii Medical Association and Assistant Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry; Ashley Shearer LCSW of the Queen’s Healthcare Coalition; and Program Developers  Kendra Ginn, Gerry Busch, M.D., and Lani Nagao. 

It was a teaching party because it was genuinely participatory. Compelled to use a web-enabled platform for safety, we discovered anew that the content was modified by the form of delivery. While we were denied the traditional Hawaiian component of food, lots of food, endless varieties of food, taken together at a common table, we did have a choice of what was available in the household. And we could run in place, do push-ups, answer whiny questions from our children without imposing on the speakers and organizers. Dr. Kiyokawa employed an audience feedback technique with near-complete engagement of the hundreds of attendees.  It was also, in what will become an era of constricted resources, really economical.  …Perhaps more recognizable will be the topics:  Cannabis, Single-Payer Healthcare Implications, Methamphetamine (2 presentations), Youth Vaping (of just about everything), Research Initiatives in SUD Demography, Homelessness & SUD, a Case Presentation involving the PDMP.  Alcohol and Opioid Use Disorders will undoubtedly resume center stage as resources replenish; but this year, we were giving the community what the community asked to receive.  It was a party. 

If I am to voice any regret, it is for my lack of foresight in not having promoted this CME-accredited  event, nationally or internationally.   I mentioned that it was really cheap, yes?

At a time when all of the faculty members were being called-upon for double duty, in serving clinical needs of their communities, the donation of effort and time to this enterprise meant giving up family time and responsibilities, sleep, and increasingly importantly, income.   In the background, Nick Athanasiou, Deedee Camara and staff at ASAM continued to produce the ASAM Weekly, Rick Saitz and his colleagues labored to produce and improve the Journal of Addiction Medicine, and our education and publication and conference committees, councils, and staff stretch their respective imaginations to increasing the baud rate of information directed to our small, mortal brains - education that is timely, useful, and credible. 

If the First Wave of national distress in this century has been exacerbation of the opioid endemic (sic), then this pandemic is surely the Second Wave. Our educational task becomes even  more important as we arguably approach the Third Wave, the substance use disorder consequences of economic depression.

- Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM