Troubled Teens Resources

“…the people were different but their look was the same - missing teeth, sunken cheeks, white skin, pus-filled sores and sunken eyes.”

Teen crisis intervention has never been more urgent than the current multi-state anti-meth campaign.

The TV ads, billboards and videos highlight the radical devastation that meth administers to it’s addicts. There is no mercy with meth. Though heroin, cocaine, and crack are just as deadly, their decimating effects are not nearly so evident as those left by meth addiction.

“This one didn’t survive,” Holley said about one the addicts, pictured on the big screen.

Another woman’s face illuminated with an air of lifelessness to it, but she was actually alive and in the middle of a meth “crash” - which is a multi-day long period of rest after a long bender.

“This is day two … After I got the tube out her throat,” Holley said.

“Why does it have to be so ugly,” she asked, before explaining that addicts have “chains” around their “veins.”

Different rhymes peppered Holley’s anti-meth points.

“The high is a lie,” she told the students, because meth gives people a feeling of power and control, even though addicts lack those virtues, she said.

The percentage of high school-aged people using methamphetamine has dropped every year for 10 years, Holley told her audience.

But meth customers die, and their pushers move on to look for new clientele - like the students in Monday’s audience, Holley said.

(source)