Drug Education News

It’s all very well educating a person young or old about drugs and what they do to the body and mind but that is only half the job.
It is an entirely different matter when the person finds themselves in a position of being offered or tempted to accept or take the substance.
There is a huge desire to conform to the crowd or group think.
A person has to have a very strong conviction of their beliefs or you could say “their reality” to stand up against a group.
There was an experiment done not that long ago on this where they set up a situation with 8 people. Seven of the group were in on the deal and were primed on how to act and what to say. Only one was not in the know.
They all went into a room in which there was a table with a drawing on a sheet of paper with a set of lines of different lengths drawn on the paper together as a group. Further over on its own was another line drawn exactly the same length as the middle line on the other group of 3 lines.
Do you follow me? Three lines together 1,2,3, each one a good bit longer than the other. Another line by itself nearby exactly the same length as the middle line of the group of three.
The group is told to say which line of the group is the same length as the line by its own. Even though it is very obvious which are the two matching lines the stooges engage the dummy and discuss this for a while and finally the stooges agree amongst themselves that the line on its own is same as the longest line.
The subject not knowing he is being set up and believing that all the others are independent like himself goes along with the other 7 and says that the line on its own is the same as the longest line even though he can well see and knows that this is not correct.
We are looking here at the power of group agreement and the desire to stay in agreement and conform to what a person believes the group hold as their reality.
My point is that this is the pressure the person is under when confronted with a group offer to get started on drugs or alcohol, (or any other activity really, good or bad). He will be told all manner of lies and “reasons” why he should get involved and this hammers against his better knowledge, training, judgement and even experience.
It takes a person of considerable strength of character to hold out against a group especially when they are school friends, buddies, workmates, or where there is a romantic interest or the desire to be liked or to make an impression.
The ability to stand and keep to one’s values, sometimes alone, against a group is a very desirable and rare quality well worth expending the effort to acquire. This quality comes under the heading of integrity.
Remember, someone has lead and convinced the group to agree that drugs or alcohol are cool or may have even fed them the false idea that these poisons actually make things better.
One choice you have is to take that person’s position, give the group the real truth and do it in a better and more convincing way than he did and turn the group around and do them all a favour which funnily enough will have a dramatic character building affect on you.
If you find that too daunting then there is always the choice of leaving that group and looking for and finding another group that has similar values to your own.
There will always be another group that has similar values to your own if you go looking hard enough. This is a better solution than compromising yourself, lowering your standards and sinking with the crowd.

Narconon Drug Education addresses this aspect of drug education.

Of course kids copy parents and if the parents are alcoholics and drug takers it is very likely that the kids will follow suit. While we can teach the kids about drugs and quite often reach them with good sense the problem really comes to a head when they are exposed to group pressure. That’s the test of effectiveness of the drug education and also the character test. It takes a very strong person to stand up against a group. See this article to get what I mean. http://www.lacrossetribune.com/news/article_101a7508-cb5c-11de-9c35-001cc4c03286.html?mode=story

This is the level of stupidity and false information we are up against.

Today’s kids have no idea what they are doing.

For instance brain these dead kids at Glen Waverly Secondary College make a YouTube video claiming that banans and milk neutralise ecstacy. Never mind that ecstacy is just harmless fun.

They think it is a big laugh. We might as well give them all hand grenades to play with. At least that would be safer and the damage would be all over in an instant and not linger on in their bodies erroding them away for the rest of their lives.  Hopefully they would just kill themselves and only those around them stupid enough to believe them.

Who needs terrorists when these crackpots can do a better job of destroying lives and hopes and dreams subversivly?

This is an example of the inbuilt invincibility of youth gone mad.

What an utter failure of parents, teachers and all concerned to have not impinged on these clowns the untold damage this sort of caper can do to the other idiots listening and watching it.

Big laugh for them. Heartbreak for those who cared and yet another burden on society from the fallout.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/student-video-plugs-safe-use-of-ecstasy-20090822-euhq.html

If many kids are already on mind altering drugs when they arrive to school, buying drugs in the school yard creates a danger that teachers weren’t trained to deal with in their education classes.  It is likely that most teachers are not even taught the physical signs of drug abuse and obviously we don’t have enough drug testing at school.

“The psychiatrists do not explain why earlier generations went to school without being drugged and had a higher reading capability,” continues Ms. Rieser. “Things seemed to be fine in school – we didn’t have school shootings.

“The only ‘drug’ in school was being ‘drugged’ to the principal’s office.  Enough ‘dose’ of that seemed to handle most situations just fine.  What happened? Rest of article

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This article from The Arizona Republic is interesting. Parents are scared of talking their children about drugs and alcohol. It is a sad thing that parents are so out of communication with their kids that they can’t talk to them. If the parent feels they can’t talk to their kids then how do you think the kids feel. These things always go both ways and if you as a parent feel that then I am sure the kid feels the same. There are some good point s in the article of which this is an excerpt.

Fathers have a powerful influence on their children, says Peter Spokes, a father of six and president of the Kansas City-based National Center for Fathering, which this year released the results of a joint study with the National PTA indicating that dads are taking a more active role in their kids’ lives.

If a father talks with his kids regularly about such tough subjects as drugs and alcohol, they’ll be more likely to come to him with questions or when something goes wrong.

Research shows that kids whose parents talk to them about drugs and alcohol are up to 50 percent less likely to use those substances, Mowrey says. In Arizona, where the average age of kids who try drugs for the first time is 13, parents need to have that talk early.

Many parents are worried that their kids will ask them about their own drug use. Mowrey says it’s important to be honest: If you lie, you risk losing your credibility should your kids discover the truth.

According to Mowrey, it’s best to say something like, “Yes, I tried drugs, but it was a dumb thing to do. No one ever talked to me about it. That’s why I’m talking to you.” Don’t provide details. As with conversations about sex, some things should remain private.

I have just been reading an article from Change.org  proposing legalising drugs as a solution.  You don’t need the link as it is a common enough proposal and they all say about the same thing. I’m sure have heard all these arguments before. Mostly from dealers, pushers or users, but not always, some are just from desperate people that either haven’t thought the thing through properly or are arm chair critics and have never been involved intimately enough to get true data. .

My reply:

How desperate can one get. Focusing  on the wrong problem of course never solves the problem. Here is my reply to this lost soul. 

The drug situation always comes from an earlier problem.

All this focus on the drug problem totally misses the real problem because the drug thing is too late on the chain of events that caused the drug situation.

 It always starts off with some earlier problem that the person is struggling with that drugs are a solution to.

It can be bad school grades, fights at home, conflicts with peers, emotional upsets with friends or enemies, weak self-respect, and a lot of times boredom and the need for excitement.

No sane, happy person truly succeeding in life and with the true data about drugs gets into the stupidity of taking them. The person always has a problem of some kind beforehand. Hundreds and hundreds of people we have rehabbed tell the same story.

The only solution to resolving the drug scene is via proper education, not weirdo scare drama dramatics or useless “dangers of drugs” campaigns.

Getting to kids early enough before the promoters and getting them to understand what drugs are all about is workable as we prove at every school presentation. But even this is not enough on its own. It also needs to be accompanied with help in the other areas such as study problems, friendship problems, getting along with others and most of all helping the individual to discover and/or revitalise their goals and purposes in life so they do not have time to be bored. Everyone has something in which they are or once was interested, many times they are buried by invalidation and ridicule from others. Kids can be very cruel to their own in this area and make others withdraw into a shell. Drugs can become very attractive to a person wiped out by their peers.

Get working in these areas and you will remove the need, interest, reason and desire for drugs and the pushers will have no customers and that is the end of the drug problem in all but for the really stupid.  And nobody can save them. One hundred percent solutions to anything are not obtainable. Solutions for the majority certainly are and they are really worth going after.

From Globe News Wire we get this:

“Moms and Dads are not always aware of the potential side effects of certain drugs,” said Maurizio Vecchione, CompuMed’s CEO. “That’s why we are launching this important parental education program. Children taking these medications are at risk of developing serious or life threatening cardiac conditions and should have ECG screenings prior to starting on these medications. We want parents to ask important questions about pre-screening their kids, which could save children’s lives.”

The importance of drug education becomes more important every day with the side line mental fraternity and the pharmaceuticals pushing mind altering concoctions.

There isn’t enough support and education in schools for drug and alcohol abuse prevention. In this modern day support and information is what is needed in our teenagers’ life. Drinking is a big problem here in the Cayman Islands that has tarnished the reputation of the young people today.

I could give you a list of at least 20 people that aren’t even 18 yet that drink alcohol on a daily basis. Drinking at such a young stage in your life is basically suicide. There are safer ways to deal with problems. You’d just be creating another dilemma for yourself by going down this path.

Now I know the whole story about why people drink and do drugs. “Oh, I was so stressed!” or, “I was pressured.” The truth is it is you who makes decisions for yourself. You weren’t pressured. You decided to take drugs and drink liquor because you thought you would appear “cool” by the standards of today’s media, which seems to always be right….
Full story: http://www.caymannewsservice.com/viewpoint/2009/06/30/drug-education-needed#comment-19470

Dr Aaron White from the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism is in Australia to help launch a new campaign by the group DrinkWise.

He says it is during adolescence that the most harm can be done to a person’s brain.

“Whenever the brain is changing it can be stifled by alcohol, and there’s an incredible amount of brain development during the adolescence years,” he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/28/2555095.htm?site=news