Youth Substance Use Prevention

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The interesting thing with addiction and alcoholism is that usually it doesn’t matter what your background is. You can have a perfectly normal and supportive family, and you can still struggle with alcoholism or addiction.

I think I felt then that I could just hammer it down and it would go away but that was not the case at all. I would have really spent more time trying to create an environment of two-way communication, doing my best to create a feeling with her that she could tell me anything.

Drugs are very accessible. It’s very common—if you didn’t have sports, if you didn’t have any hobbies like art or theater or anything, even if you did have it—it just kind of felt like there was nothing to do.

One thing that I always tell parents to be cognizant of is rapid change in friend group, rapid change in activities that someone was participating in, hobbies and things that young people were passionate about that kind of go on the back burner. Those are a huge indicator to me that there may be something a little bit more significant going on.

I was hanging out with people who were older than me. It was like I had these feelings of chronic low self-esteem, so I was really easily able to idolize these people. When I was in high school it was, like, seniors and juniors. I had this image of them that they had their life together and they were so happy and cool, and it’s really because in the, like, mental health and substance abuse community, people aren’t talking about how they feel usually. So now, especially with Instagram, like Snapchat, social media platforms, you really don’t know what’s going on inside people’s heads.

So when I was growing up, we had Facebook. I think the iPhone wasn’t even invented yet. Nowadays we see young people that are comparing themselves to the millions of other people that they’re seeing online via Instagram or YouTube or Tik Tok. That’s a losing battle, right? No wonder that anxiety and depression and low self-esteem are on the rise. It’s because if you’re comparing yourself to the millions of other people that you’re seeing online, yeah, of course there’s going to be a feeling of emptiness.

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So I started having body image issues at a really young age, and I did have, at a really young age, guys comparing our bodies to one another and, like, ranking who was the prettiest, and it was really hard.

The shame and the addiction are almost inseparable, and so when you just fearmonger and create this judgment, it does nothing but push people further into the hole of addiction.

You could have told me all of these things. I heard all of these things, and yet here I am today. The fearmongering simply does not work, and I think the greatest harm reduction that could be done or can be done is opening lines of communication that are safe and comfortable and easy to access.

You know as far as advice that I would offer to other parents that are going through this, I would say, you know, you have to have faith that things are going to turn out okay, you can never fall into the pit of hopelessness, and you have to live life. Stephen Hawking said, “Where there’s life there’s hope.” Each of us do. That’s important for all of us to make the best we can of the life we’ve been given.

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There’s a saying in the recovery community: We’re only as sick as our secrets. The idea of hiding the fact that we have a child that’s, you know, suffering from addiction or mental health, that is not going to fix anything.

I find that a lot of parents are trying to differentiate between what is, like, a normal teenaged angst and what might be indications of something a little bit more sinister.

My first experiences with substances was when I was 12. I sought out marijuana. At pretty much all times I had some form of weed pen or cartridge.

At a really young age, I had sworn that I was never going to get involved with marijuana, any pills, any hard drugs, nothing. I swore it off. As I got older and I saw more and more people using substances around me, it just kind of seemed like less and less of a big deal.

There were certainly signs, looking back, that there were issues, but I was pretty oblivious for many years.

So I tried weed for the first time when I was I want to say 12 years old and drank alcohol by the time I was 13, and it still felt very innocent. My drinking was not normal when I started. The first time I ever drank, I blacked out, I threw up everywhere, and the next day, I woke up, and I was like, “When do I get to do that again?”

I was very secretive about my drug and alcohol use. I was a straight A student, I was first team football player, I had great friends, a great girlfriend. I had the high school picture life, but behind closed doors, I was physically dependent on Xanax and opiates.

So by the time I was 14 years old, I was doing cocaine. I was doing MDMA. And because there are no, like, “pure” drugs anymore, the first time I did MDMA, I actually did methamphetamine and I was like 15 years old. And by 15 years old, I was doing Xanax consistently, I was doing benzos, I was drinking all the time. Whatever I could get my hands on, I was doing.

I had access to prescription opiates. It eventually led to stealing prescription opiates, then buying them off the street, and when I could no longer afford that, I made the switch to fentanyl pills when I was 15. From the point that I first took a prescription pill to the time I was fully physically dependent on fentanyl was less than a year.

I went with my problems undetected for almost the entirety of my substance abuse and alcoholism. The breaking point and the action of asking for help had to come from me internally.

It wasn’t until I was 16 where I couldn’t take it anymore, and I got honest to my therapist for the first time. And he told me that I had two options: one was that he would go and tell my parents, or I could bring them in the room. And I cried like a baby in my mom’s lap and told her that I was addicted to fentanyl.

Hope is not a plan. We have to connect with others, we have to bear each other’s burdens, we have to be open and honest about the things that we see and the things that are happening, and we have to begin to connect and reach out to others. Put those resources and plans in place.

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I had a conversation with one of my daughter’s friends. Her friend told me that they would go to a party in high school and there would be everything there. In one corner there would be the ecstasy/MDMA, in another corner, cocaine, in another quarter, Xanax, pharmaceuticals, another quarter, marijuana, alcohol. Everything is normalized. Everything is accessible.

More often than not, I find that young people are seeking it out. They’re seeking out a feeling of acceptance. They’re seeking out a feeling of community and camaraderie. If older individuals at a high school level are using substances, it’s really young people’s curiosity nowadays is much more prevalent than I think it ever has been.

When I first reached out to my parents about what was going on, they were always very much the trusting type, and they in fact were told by my therapist at the time, who also did not know the drugs that I was doing, that they should trust me until they had reason not to. That old school mindset wasn’t useful because my parents didn’t really have a reason not to trust me, and so they did trust me.

It’s terrifying. I feel scared almost every day for my friends who aren’t sober. Three of my friends have overdosed and died from fentanyl, and it’s just not safe anymore.

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I’m a police officer. I’ve been a police officer for over 20 years, so I’ve seen firsthand the devastation of fentanyl. I’ve administered Narcan personally, I’ve given CPR—and those are the lucky ones. The reality is that I’ve also gone on many, many, many calls with parents holding the hands of their dead children.

When people say that the days of experimentation are over, it’s absolutely true. I know two buddies who were coming home on a school trip. They were going to college in Indiana and they were at a party at UDub. They were on the bus. They got what they thought was cocaine. One did a bump and overdosed, and one did a line and his heart immediately stopped and it was permanent brain damage.

You know, a lot of people will reach out for help, and a lot of people don’t make it because of the reality of the fentanyl that’s going around right now. My friend who passed away, they found her journal that night, and her intention was not to overdose and die that night and she did.

I think a lot of parents think of cannabis or those substances as not as big of a deal. There’s, like, this idea that this is normal, this is a normal exploration of young people trying to find themselves in the world. All of the substances that are rampantly available to young people are much stronger than they ever have been. We see a lot of young people that are struggling with really significant and acute mental health issues just as a byproduct of recreationally starting to explore with different substances. Parents need to be really focused on the fact that this is not the same substances that was available to them when they were growing up. We’re talking about very different chemical compounds, and this stuff can lead to yes, obviously fentanyl and plenty of other substances, but even with the cannabis alone, it’s way stronger than it ever has been, and there’s some really significant mental health challenges that can come to fruition as a result of experimenting, exploring those different types of substances.

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