Troubled Teens Resources

Teenagers tend to be self-righteous in their political ideals these days. They deplore exploitation and war yet seem to have no idea what their teen age drug abuse supports. Perhaps parents can make headway in convincing troubled teens that their use of illegal drugs is rather hypocritical given the devastation it causes. Not just in their and their families’ lives, but in the lives of the impoverished who grow crops for the drug cartels, to the gangs that make their neighborhoods war zones in the distribution of it.

The following addresses those who advocate for drug legalization and might be food for thought for your teenager.

“Most, if not all, libertarians insist that drug usage is a victimless crime. It isn’t. In today’s world, its victims are legion. Whether they are innocent bystanders killed in gun battles between rival drug factions in American cities, or the thousands of South Americans who have been kidnapped, robbed, or murdered by the powerful drug cartels, any American who uses illegal drugs today has blood on his hands. I disagree when libertarians try to pin all the blame on Uncle Sam. Laws criminalizing drugs don’t drive drug prices into the stratosphere by themselves. The other factor is American demand for those drugs.If you want to work for the decriminalization of drugs, then do so; but until those drugs are legal, don’t tell me that you have a right to use them. If you choose to use illegal drugs, your choice is helping to kill people. This is not, and never will be, your right.”

(source)

Teen crisis intervention, in one form or another, is a necessity for our nation’s youth. As recently released studies have indicated, the war on drugs is, at best, holding the line against the constant threat of illegal drugs but failing tho thwart the growing abuse of legal prescriptions.

Funding for schools for troubled teens,rehab programs and other juvenile programs is one of the biggest obstacles in obtaining help for teens at risk.Some of the most effective programs are locally grown and privately funded through businesses and a network of volunteers. So it is sad to read of an invitation issued for volunteer mentors and not one person in this small community responded.

“A call to help troubled teens turn their life around fell on deaf ears Saturday. Actually, it fell on no ears at all.

The Youth Hope Foundation and the Department of Juvenile Justice kicked off its Life Coach Initiative at Saint Andrews Presbyterian Church.

They hoped to sign up people to help mentor kids from the time they are detained until long after they are released, but no one showed up to volunteer.

“There’s a lot of kids that are alone on the weekends and nobody comes to visit them. They feel like nobody cares and no body wants to help them and what kind of message are we giving them when the community does not respond to an issue like this its like telling them we don’t care about you, just stay where you are,” said Susan Bowman.”

(Source)

The juvenile offender in Cicero will be making their acquaintance with the type of discipline that resembles what is meted out in boot camps.

Next time a Cicero youth is caught vandalizing property, carrying illegal drugs or tagging a home with graffiti, police may tell the child to drop and give them 20.

The town approved an ordinance at its Tuesday board meeting that creates a police-administered “boot camp” where non-violent juvenile offenders could be sent for rehabilitation.

“Hopefully boot camp will put a little fear into them as to what is expected of them in society,” said Rolando Hernandez, deputy superintendent of internal affairs with the Cicero Police Department. “It’s a great idea and … will be a good program for the town.”

Teens will be presented with 50 hours of boot camp type drilling and instruction, divided up into several four hour Saturday sessions. Included will be mentoring, anger management classes as well as two hours of intense physical training.

It is hoped such intervention will deter the teens at risk from involvement in teen age drug abuse or other criminal activities in the future, as well as give them a tie to the community by applying some of that intense physical labor towards town clean up and other volunteer work.

“Police and court hearing officers can suggest the boot camp, on a case by case basis, to youth found in violation of administrative ordinances. Schools and parents can also recommend a child’s participation in the program, Hernandez said.”

(source)

Teen crisis intervention will be necessary as long as teens are considered marketing targets for both drug dealers and Madison Avenue.

We’ve posted before on the devious ingenuity drug dealers have recently exhibited by marketing their drugs to pre teens and elementary school kids. A post at Shaping Youth rightfully points out the same strategies at play in mainstream advertising, the purposeful targeting of youth.

“What started as Sacramento news and spread from west to midwest…is now being internet e-blasted to parents with truthful school warnings and news videos that drug dealers are targeting teens with strawberry and cola flavored methamphetamine to “hook ‘em early” on illegal drugs. (old news from awhile back gone viral, actually)
[…]
Granted, the fruity cocaine scene hit the Hollywood tabloids prior.. BUT the Madison Avenue meets urban lowlife element adds a nefarious element. When age compression marketing tactics and junk food appeal are used to target kids for addiction, the branding trend toward tweens and teens is one to watch. Sound familiar? It should. Corporate giants spend mega-millions on advertising to seed a similar strategy.

Alcopops. Pink cigarettes. Jolt-n-crash energy drinks. Caffeine shots. Candy-flavored meth? The end goal is the same, whether it’s nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, or methamphetamine…the marketer’s aim is to hook ‘em on a habit while kids’ bodies are most susceptible.”

Both drug dealers and corporate America have only the bottom line in mind. One doesn’t expect drug dealers to care about kids but one would be equally unwise to imagine America’s corporation any longer feel any responsibility, no matter what public front they put on it.

The first few times a college student abuses prescription drugs might be to get thru exams. Then the addition of sports or a part time job cuts into study time and he finds he need more hours of the days to stay awake. The natural progression from there is to find drugs to go to sleep when the uppers won’t let you. From there, recreational use is the next easy step and, according to statistics, it ’s a step too many teenage college students take.

“…a recent study which found a dramatic increase in prescription drug abuse on college campuses from 1993 to 2005. The study, “Wasting the Best and the Brightest: Substance Abuse at America’s Colleges and Universities,” was released by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.

Nearly half of full-time students binge drink and/or abuse prescription and illegal drugs, according to the report, and 1.8 million full-time students meet the medical criteria for dependency of a controlled substance.

Abuse of prescription opioids, or pain killers, increased 342.9 percent; abuse of prescription tranquilizers such as Xanax and Valium rose 450 percent; and abuse of prescription stimulants such as Adderall was up 93.3 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the study.”
(Source)

Shopping for a Doctor

Students claim that it is easy to acquire scripts, just a matter of knowing the students who have a legitimate script or shopping for a doctor who will write one without bothering to question the list of fake symptoms presented.

If you think you have made it safely past the shoals of teen age drug abuse, there is an entirely new and dangerous arena that your teenager faces in college. With incredible pressure, easy availability and seemingly no other means of “keeping up”, a college student is beset by a whole different set of reasons to fall into drug dependency.

You already have a troubled teen that you have successfully placed in a boarding school with an excellent drug therapy program. You are reassured of her progress and grateful that you were able to find a boarding school, or in this case, a brat camp that met your teens emotional needs and academic requirements.
But you are now thinking ahead to when your two toddlers enter into the higher grades and become subject to the influence of drug abusing peers. There wasn’t much in the way of community support available for you when you were seeking placement of your older child and you want to see that change.
There are many programs to explore. One such interesting program is Parent Corps.

“The Parent Corps is a new, national effort dedicated to helping parents prevent their children from using alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs. Modeled on the same principles as the Peace Corps, it harnesses the power of parents working together to keep their children drug free. The Parent Corps recruits, trains, certifies, and pays part-time or full-time salaries to Parent Leaders for two years of service. It institutionalizes the parent movement of the late 1970s into the early 1990s. That movement proved it could change social norms and get results, cutting past-month drug use by two-thirds among adolescents and young adults between 1979 and 1992.
[…]
Drug prevention programs have been around for a long time. Some are aimed at parents, most are aimed at children. Nearly all provide short-term courses on the dangers of drugs and ways to avoid use.

The Parent Corps is an ongoing process that offers parents a strong peer support network grounded by a Parent Leader. Like the neighborhood of yesterday, where everyone looked after every child on the street, Parent Leaders alert parents to the marketing machine behind drugs and help them immunize children against it. The vision is to have Parent Leader in every school in the country by 2014.”

What do Parent Leaders do?

• contact all parents in the school
• educate them about how drugs affect children
• teach them about how children are at risk
• persuade them to believe research showing that they are the most powerful influences in their children’s lives
• mobilize them into groups that stop the marketing of drugs to children
• create a support network that fosters the growth of healthy children capable of reaching their full potential

You can find out how to start a Parent Corps for your community here.

Give a drug dealer training and a job. A novel approach and what could be a positive intervention against the flow of illegal drugs. Corner drug dealers are a common sight in almost any urban neighborhood. The tragic consequences of the constant drug trade usually become the daily headlines in local newspapers as shootings and gang war become regular reports. Providence, R.I. is employing a unique program to change that.

“The police start by going after the street-level drug dealers and their hierarchy in the worst drug-plagued area, or “beachhead.” The next step is unusual: The police select a few nonviolent offenders, the dealers who are young and have the potential to be rehabilitated. Instead of arresting them, the police give the dealers a second chance and turn them over to the community groups, such as the Urban League, which provide jobs, education and counseling.

The approach encourages the community to trust the police, Kennedy said, which leads residents to work with the police to prevent more drug dealers from returning. The dealers with a second chance serve as an example to the younger generation.
[…]
“We were open to it because we were tired of being a narcotics-arresting machine,” said Esserman, who knew Kennedy from when the professor was at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “And there’s something compelling about a second chance.” The Urban League of Rhode Island was eager to try it. “It seemed like an opportunity to transform the neighborhood,” said Luis Aponte, an administrator at the Urban League and a Providence city councilman. “The conditions were also ripe. We had the presence of a police chief who demonstrated the willingness to work with the community, and the Urban League was often called in to be a conduit between the Police Department and the community.”
(Source)

Intervention in the current teenage drug crisis engulfing small towns and cities alike has to deal with this fundamental linchpin of drug culture; the money. The sheer economics of dealing are difficult to defeat. It is so very hard to lure a teenager with a fast food job when the big money and the ’street creds’ are found dealing dope. But train an enterprising mind in a field that they have an interest in, apprentice those willing to work, and you can start making street corner bling look shabby.

Sometimes the problems confronting youth and troubled teens seem overwhelming, beyond what any one group or individual can hope to fight. Looked at in that way, the world of drugs, gangs and raves with their constant lure of the street and the music and the drugs all seem much larger than what everyday parents can go up against.

But the power of the individual to sway drug abusing troubled teenagers to go straight or return to school can not be dismissed. Proof that one adult can change the course of a troubled teens’ life is something that the Big Brother’s and Big Sister’s organizations have proven for decades now.
Whether you are a parent or not, you have something to give an at-risk teen that they can’t find too easily;the gift of your friendship and counsel.

“National research has shown that positive relationships between youth and their Big Brothers and Big Sisters mentors have a direct and measurable impact on children’s lives. By participating in our youth mentoring programs, Little Brothers and Sisters are:

• More confident in their schoolwork performance
• Able to get along better with their families
• 46% less likely to begin using illegal drugs
• 27% less likely to begin using alcohol
• 52% less likely to skip school.

Big Brothers Big Sisters volunteers had the greatest impact in the area of alcohol and substance abuse prevention. For every 100 youth between ages 10 and 16 who start using drugs, the study found, only 54 similar youth who are matched with a Big will start using drugs. Minority boys and girls were the most strongly influenced; they were 70 percent less likely than their peers to initiate drug use.

“We have known all along that Big Brothers Big Sisters’ mentoring has a long-lasting, positive effect on children’s confidence, grades, and social skills,” said Judy Vredenburgh, Big Brothers Big Sisters’ President and CEO, “and the results of this impact study scientifically confirm that belief.”

“These dramatic findings are very good news, particularly at a time when many people contend that ‘nothing works’ in reaching teenagers,” Public/Private Ventures President Gary Walker added. “This program suggests a strategy the country can build on to make a difference, especially for youth in single-parent families.”
(

Source)
If you have been wanting to do something to stem the tide of teenagers being swept into a life of teen age drug abuse and pain, Big Brothers or Big Sisters can be the one place where your efforts can make the difference.

“Prevention is always better than intervention after the fact,” she said. “I think some of the children were quite emotional to see students their own age go through this.”

Prevention in this case comes in the form of a play titled The Drug Store that dramatizes for elementary age school children the course of a young, troubled teen’s entanglement in robbery and drug abuse, culminating in his death.

“Law enforcement agencies presented The Drug Store to 1,200 students at the Chino Fairgrounds last week.

Nine stations were set up, each partitioned by curtains, representing a different scene in a play, which followed a student through the course of his life on drugs.

It began with a pharmacy stage in which students were educated by narcotics officers who identified the replicas of a variety of illegal drugs, such as black tar heroin and marijuana.

Unbeknownst to the audience, a fellow student acted the role of a thief by stealing a package of the drug Ecstasy.

Daniel Barnett, a fifth-grader at Liberty Elementary School, continued his acting through each scene, where he was arrested and sentenced to weekend jail time and probation.”

The play was all the more powerful because many of the actors were familiar faces;teachers,pastors and students that the young audience already knew. The final dramatization depicted the teenage drug addict, played by a classmate, laying in a casket.

“Deacon Marlin Filipek of Saint Mary Magdalene Catholic Church was robed as he led the funeral as one of many volunteers who used their real profession to make an impression on the students.

“We’re planting a seed,” he said. “A lot of kids have never seen a casket.”

At the end of the dramatization the children lined up to look inside of the casket, where two mirrors lay in place of a body.

“There have been a few a-ha moments where the students get it,” Filipek said.

Daniel Fleeup, also of Liberty Elementary, was one of them.

“If you were to be the ones to take the drugs, then you’d be the one in the casket,” he said after seeing his reflection in the mirrors.

As for Daniel Barnett, he said the acting experience taught him not to use drugs, “no matter what.”
(Source)

More and more police organizations and schools are implementing early crisis intervention tools such as this play. If you are concerned about your at-risk teen or if your teenager has been an increasingly bad influence on a younger sibling, check in your community for something similar.