Part A - Society for Public Health Education

in the performance of the three core functions of public health: assessment, policydevelopment, and quality assurance. By focusing on prevention, health educationreduces the financial and human costs that individuals, employers, medical facilities,insurance companies, and the nation would spend on health care and medicaltreatment.Health educators can also play a role in raising awareness and rallying communitysupport in the battle against meth. Health educators may be involved in activitiessuch as the following:• Assessing the extent of a local methamphetamine problem and existing effortsto combat the problem• Working collaboratively with community members, leaders, and otherprofessionals to plan, implement, and evaluate activities to either preventa methamphetamine problem in the community or combat an existingproblem• Acting as a resource, advocate, and communicator to enable a community toaddress methamphetamine abuse and production at the local level“Helping Communities Combat ClandestineMethamphetamine Laboratories”In an effort to address the important public health issue of clandestine methamphetaminelaboratories (“clan meth labs”), SOPHE and the American College ofMedical Toxicology (ACMT), with the support of the Agency for Toxic Substancesand Disease Registry (ATSDR), joined together to develop this publication toprovide health educators and other health care professionals with the information,resources, and guidelines available for addressing clan meth labs at the communitylevel. This toolkit was created to maximize anti-meth efforts by synthesizing theinformation on meth and meth labs that is available from an overwhelming numberof sources and locations and making it available in one comprehensive resource.Although “Part A: An Educational Toolkit for Health Educators” was designedand written with health educators in mind, we feel that it will be useful to a widevariety of professionals and community members working on meth-related issues.In Part A, you will find the following components:• A primer about methamphetamine and clandestine methamphetaminelaboratories, which provides basic facts and statistics about what meth isand its history, how it is abused, who uses it, its health effects on the user,© 2007 Society for Public Health EducationHelping Communities Combat Clandestine Methamphetamine Laboratories