Troubled Teens Resources

Teens at risk sometimes give no indication that they will ultimately succumb to teen age drug abuse.

“Ralph is shaking Lauren Jolly, a 17-year-old with a pretty face and light, shoulder-length brown hair, a former Brownie Scout, a junior at Birmingham Groves High School, a heroin addict her friends can no longer help.”

Such an odd statement…”her friends could no longer help”. You wonder how they tried. What could they have done to bring to a halt their friend’s slow descent.

“It’s May 24, 2006, and she is about to become the public face of fentanyl, a nasty laboratory concoction often mixed with heroin that exploded on the streets of Detroit, ending the lives of hundreds of metro-Detroit drug users, and more than 1,000 people nationwide.”

Yes, it’s yet another drug, another conconcoction courtesy of the dealers and the dirty labs that they run. fentanyl, like all drugs, does not discriminate between it’s victims. Rich, black, female, poor, educated or decent - it doesn’t matter once the drug owns you.

“The drug stole a once-promising young bowler from Shelby Township, a retired autoworker from Detroit, an ex-logger from out state and the lead guitarist in a rock band.

Inside the house in Detroit, a 21-year-old from Pontiac named Ben puts his fingers to the neck of the Bloomfield Township teen and feels a slow pulse.

Someone draws cold water and pours it over Lauren.

The girl is still breathing, but her pulse is faint, her blood pressure plummeting. Her eyes roll back … and she is somewhere else.”

So begins the prologue to a 15 part series on the drug fentanyl and it’s devastating presence in Detroit. Perhaps it should be mandatory summer reading for troubled teenagers.