Street Children and Drug Abuse: Social and Health Consequences

Summary

There are 30 million severely marginalized children and adolescents living on the world’s streets. Other vulnerable children and youth live in poverty, many of them homeless and abused. These facts represent an urgent public health issue for all nations. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) welcomed the opportunity to cosponsor the multinational meeting, Street Children and Drug Abuse: Social and Health Consequences, because it provided a unique opportunity to address the issue with the World Health Organization (WHO) network of community-based organizations and researchers. The meeting was designed to stimulate interest in the topic, plan strategies to develop a cross-national research agenda focusing on vulnerable children and youth, and to support the development of science-based interventions to protect the
health of especially vulnerable young people in many parts of the world.