Reply With QuoteThey learned from that session that young adults really listen to the words of other young adults
New strategy in opioid fight sees teens replace adults
December 18, 2018
by ETHAN POWERS
Editor
In March, a packed auditorium at Clarence High School listened intently to a panel of experts discuss the prevalence of opioids in communities nationwide.
The panel, ranging from health care professionals to a retired narcotics officer, facilitated an open discussion about the rampant use of opioids that has ravaged lives and left countless bodies in its wake.
Yet one speaker on the panel stood out among the rest — a face of the epidemic that the other, older panelists could not begin to represent.
Andrew, a recovering opioid addict told the audience that his problems with addiction began as early as age 9 when he began drinking and smoking with his older brother’s friends. At age 13, he discovered painkillers. As he spoke, Clarence Town Justice Mike Powers, also a panelist, noticed that the audience was hanging on his every word.
After the event’s conclusion, Powers had an epiphany.
“Rehabilitation is important and counseling is important, but they’re not solving the problem; they’re just cleaning up the mess,” he said. “By the time the counselors or the drug courts get involved, the damage has been done. These kids have lost their youth, and sometimes their adolescent brains have been rewired. The critical issue that can solve this problem is prevention, and that means reaching these kids before they start using.”
To do that, Powers concocted an idea for a new kind of opioid forum, one that would serve as a new prevention strategy with kids themselves, not adults, at the forefront of the message.
“It occurred to me that we had this panel of adults telling kids, ‘Don’t do this.’ The kids have heard that a thousand times,” said Powers. “When a kid stands up there though, that grabs everyone’s attention.”
Powers organized an introductory, teen-led session in October with the help of the Rev. Thomas Doyle at Our Lady of Peace Church in Clarence. The public event featured five youths from Powers’ drug court and was initially scheduled to run for about an hour. More than two hours after it began, the pews were packed with attendees.
“People wanted to talk to these kids. They wanted to hear the kids’ stories. They wanted to know how they began using and what it’s like trying to recover, and no one can tell that story like these kids who have experienced it,” Powers said.
Now, Powers is in the midst of raising the new strategy’s ambitions. In February, he has scheduled a crew of his drug court kids to go to health classes at Clarence Middle School and has been in talks with neighboring municipalities to implement similar events in those towns.
While the opioid crisis remains a prevalent problem nationwide, Erie County has seen a slight reprieve through the last year. According to the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office, the number of county residents who died last year from opioid overdoses fell by 17 percent, while a total of 251 people died of overdoses in 2017, the lowest number of the deaths over the past three years.
Yet the problem requires constant vigilance and aggressive solutions. In 2018, the available data points to about 182 deaths confirmed or suspected to be caused by opioid abuse.
Kevin Modlmayer, the coordinator of the Family Support Center in the Clarence Central School District, was present at the Our Lady of Peace forum.
“The kids don’t hold anything back. It’s a very real presentation,” he said. “I saw it, and both the kids and parents respond well to it. It’s not just the abstract of what could happen. These kids have actually been through it.”
For Modlmayer, even the elementary level is not too early to begin addiction conversations with students.
“Students don’t walk into the door in sixth grade and have issues. The more preventive programs we can get in, the better,” he said.
Greg Kaszubski, director of health and physical education for the Clarence schools, agrees that a student-focused approach is the more effective one when considering preventive education options.
“When someone who is an addict says that directly to them, it has more impact than the health teacher saying it,” he said. “The teacher is passing on information they know, but when you have a student in front of them, it’s powerful.”
Kaszubski has firsthand knowledge of how easy access to opioids and potential addiction has become. His son, a soccer player in college, broke his leg in his sophomore season. After surgery, he was prescribed far more opioids than was needed for the initial pain relief.
Working in education, Kaszubski and his wife immediately changed the prescription, but he says the ordeal was an added reminder of the threat.
According to Kaszubski, the school district’s health units on addiction and mental health are based on two main components: presenting definitions and warning signs to students, followed by steps to take if the red flags apply. He adds that getting other students in front of them who have experienced the travails of addiction will be a needed addition to the curriculum.
“It is always moving for the kids to hear from someone like them, who didn’t plan on being an addict, but who now is an addict,” he said.
Powers believes that the student-oriented strategy has already made waves in its infancy stages. Now, he says, the plan is to move the approach forward and reach as many young faces as possible before that first confrontation with the drugs.
“The next step is to reach out to towns that have drug courts and encourage those judges to contact their local schools and have their drug court kids staff these programs,” he said. “That way, we can spread this effective method throughout Western New York and maybe beyond.”
