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Are You Your Child's Own Drug Dealer?
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Published: February 20, 2008
So is your son or daughter having Special K as an after school snack? And do you know we're not talking cereal?
As if you didn't have enough to worry about, it turns out that the drug dealer nobody has been talking about, the one who has been supplying your son or daughter, is probably only a few feet away inside your medicine cabinet.
These are not easy times to grow up in this country. I suppose it never has been, but for parents and young people alike, they are frightening. Last week in a column I mentioned that every middle and high school in the district has gangs inside its student body. Drugs are a part of those cultures.
But this isn't so much about gangs.
Meet Bob Stutman. He spent 25 years with the Drug Enforcement Administration. For several years he was the Special Agent in Charge of the New York Division. The man knows drugs. He gets credit for warning the country that crack cocaine was creating a new and dangerous culture.
These days his company designs and implements substance abuse prevention programs for communities, corporations and school systems. Next week he will be in Lakeland for a couple of days, meeting with business executives and speaking at George Jenkins High School. He is being brought in by TEC, which is an organization for CEOs, which I think says something about a growing awareness of a problem that is eating away at a generation.
1-Track Mind
Stutman is a matter-of-fact sort of guy. I'm not sure I would want to get stuck next to him at a dinner party. He seems totally absorbed in the drug wars that have swallowed up his life for three decades now.
He knows the numbers and terminology, but that's the sort of stuff the news throws at you every day and nobody seems to do anything about. We can run a story that says with only four percent of the world's population the United States consumes 60 percent of the world's drugs, but five minutes later you've forgotten about it.
What I appreciate about Stutman is that he is interested in prevention and early intervention. He doesn't just show up, give his speech and move on to the next town. He meets with several groups in a community, from school administrators to students to parents. There are action groups and follow-ups.
Homemade Fruit Salad
"Parents don't know what's going on, even in their own homes," he says. He talks about younger and younger children who mix "fruit salad" combinations out of medicine cabinets and then wash them down with alcohol. "Kids are under tremendous peer pressure," he says. "What they are missing is pressure and understanding from the other side, from parents and adults who don't even know what's going on around them."
He says he's an optimist but doesn't think we will ever eliminate drugs from the streets. "The solution is prevention and education," he says.
It's ironic, isn't it? I mean think of the millions and millions we have spent fighting a drug war on everybody from the Colombian kingpins to the street dealers, and someone from the DEA says the real war is in our own medicine cabinets and the front line is parents and educators trying to learn what our youth already knows.
For more of Steve Otto's musings, check out his blog, Keyword: Otto Graphs.
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