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.

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Vanity, thy name is teenager. And that’s as it should be - for awhile. Narcissism will, in a healthy human being, give way to compassion, empathy and regard for others. But for awhile, teens are indeed vain. That is what the producers of the newest campaign against teen age drug abuse are appealing to when they developed and produced a short film depicting the grotesque results of meth addiction.

“To avoid tired clichés and hollow messages, the group attempted to appeal to an issue close to the heart of young people — themselves.

“ We really tried to get into the vanity issues of what you look like if you’re a meth user, ” Maloney said.

The spots, which are in both English and Spanish, focus on how quickly the drug ages users by rotting their teeth and wrinkling their skin and how easy it is to become addicted to the substance.

“ Young people will have a little bit more of an in-your-face experience with it in an entertaining way, ” he said. “ There’s no reason to try to sugar-coat this stuff. Be honest and sincere about what you’re trying to tell people, and it comes through. ”

It comes through on billboards, on TV specials saturating the local air waves, and in spots slotted to run between previews and movies at the theater. The power of meth to ravage communities is keenly felt by entire towns whose youth have been targeted by drug cartels from south of the border. A stark, candid presentation was deemed to be the right approach.

“Maloney determined that the same old educational techniques wouldn’t work anymore. Young people are relational, and their own encounters with the ill effects of drug use will convince them more than any cliché ever will, he said.”

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“Matt says at the facility they were forced to wear the same clothes and shave their heads, and they aren’t allowed to speak unless spoken to. “They strip you of your identity,” he says. Matt spent three months at Casa by the Sea, but “most people are there for years,” he says.
[…]
“They scared me straight,” he says.”

Not even the most severe schools for troubled teens will put you through that. But if it is your third time in rehab for meth addiction and you aren’t even out of high school yet, severe consequences are in order.

The frightening aspects of addiction may however follow troubled teens far into adulthood. Because it re-trains your brain. It acts on reward centers in such a way that they may ultimately be incapacitated, suggesting an addicts ability to “activate” the pleasure or reward centers in their brain just may not function anymore.

“When a person uses a substance for a long period of time, the neurons that produce dopamine can become impaired, and they appear to turn off. When this happens, the body stops producing dopamine because the drugs look and act just like it, Parker says.

“The trick is to find behavioral ways to turn them back on,” he says. “But it’s unclear whether that is always possible.”

Some drugs, Parker says, can damage a person’s neurotransmitter systems so badly that he may never be able to return to homeostasis, the body’s normal state before the addiction.”

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Teen crisis intervention is hard to implement in a community where parents and citizens tend to be in denial. Wealthier communities may have a particularly hard time understanding that drugs and drug problems are no longer confined to certain demographics. Troubled teenagers come from both sides of the track.

And what is true in America is apparently also true in Great Britain. One mother, desperate for her son’s life, lashes back at her wealthy neighbors for failing to take the problem seriously.

“One local mother says it’s time for parents to wake up and realize all youths are at risk of becoming drug addicts.

Peggy Strife, who lives in a $400,000 home in a good neighbourhood, has been grappling with her 20-year-old son Brad’s crystal meth addiction for the past several years.

“I’m waiting for him to die,” said Strife about her son…Strife and her spouse lived through their own period of denial about what drugs were doing to Brad. She doesn’t want to see anyone else ignore the problem.

Strife disapproves of recent letters to the editor in the Herald where people have expressed opposition to building a youth treatment centre here.

“We have a high drug rate here and people don’t want to admit it,” Strife said.

When Strife was cruising the streets with a baseball bat, attempting to stop her son from finding and using meth, she rarely tracked down her son in areas like the West Flat, which she says tend to be associated with substance abuse issues.

“A lot of the houses I was at were on the East and West hills,” said Strife. She estimated that there were six youth drug dealers within a five-block radius of her upper-class home.

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America is not alone in developing teen crisis intervention measures to fight meth addiction. England now fears that the plague is crossing the water and that they shall soon find themselves needing addicted teen help to deal with their own epidemic.

You would think that the facts about meth would be enough to warn any sane person away. If not the facts, than the pictures of ravaged users that serve as evidence for the facts. The woman pictured here has used for 10 years. But teens still imagine that they really do know it all and consider warnings to be scare tactics. A few times won’t hurt, so they think.

True of some drugs, but not of meth. More so, it may be decades later before a user finds out just how much an addiction will cost them.

“Young people who use crystal meth risk long-term damage to their brain cells similar to that caused by Parkinson’s disease.

The crystal drug destroys nerve cells that produce dopamine. These are directly related to movement control.

The Class A ‘party drug’ is an extremely powerful and addictive stimulant. It can cause a rapid heart rate, paranoia, confusion and violence. It also increases the risk of stroke, lung and kidney damage.

It was previously thought that crystal meth, known as methamphetamine, led to short-term psychotic behaviour but did not have an effect after users stopped using it.

But research leader Dr Jacqueline McGinty said the findings were worrying as the drug posed “long-term public health consequences.” She said the negative effects of the drug might not be apparent until decades after a person has used it.”

(Source)
(Image source/click to enlarge)

Teen crisis intervention in the arena of meth addiction is needed on such a comprehensive scale that it boggles the imagination. Some parts of the country have yet to experience the scourge while in other areas, such as in Montana, the problem is epidemic and teens at risk are falling like flies.

Meth is perhaps one of the most frightening drugs around simply because it is so very easy to become hooked and almost impossible to quit. A teen that dares to play with meth is almost sentencing himself to years of incredible humiliation and pain. This is why parents are galvanizing the introduction of intervention programs in city after city. One such program, Mothers Against Meth-Amphetamine or MAMA, a Christian based group, has created a website with downloadable pamphlets, videos and educational material on meth addiction and how to fight it. As is usual with such grass roots efforts, the program came about as a result of tragedy.

“Jim was Dr. Holley’s youngest brother. He was 22 years old when he became addicted to methamphetamine and he was 24 years old when it killed him. Jim killed himself on the 4th of July, 2000 because of the delusions he suffered as a result of his meth addiction. About 6 months before Jim committed suicide, he came over to his sister Dr. Holley’s house. He wanted to talk. And what he had to say was so important it had to be put on TV. So Dr. Holley’s husband recorded it as an interview on the family video camera. Years later, this footage was incorporated into the High Is a Lie video. Dr. Holley explains how meth causes hallucinations, and then Jim has a hallucination. She explains how this drug is addictive the first time it is used, and Jim says, “I’ll never get back what I lost that night.” The video closes with a visit to Jim’s grave.”

MAMA

Teen crisis intervention in the area of meth addiction has become a war.

“The Mexican Mafia came onto reservations with a Fortune 500 business plan to begin establishing places of distribution or transport into our communities,” Moore said.”

Perhaps troubled teenagers would think twice before purchasing drugs if they had a clue as to who was behind selling them. Teens at risk today take perverse pride in being-anti;anti- big oil, anti- corruption, anti-poverty. Maybe it is time to not only educate kids about the dangers of drugs but to also expose them to the “corrupt big business” that markets them, perpetuating the poverty of addiction. Perhaps teens could get as upset about the corrupt business of drug distribution as they seem to get over big oil.

“Wind River, Wyo., was one of the first reservations to be targeted. Mexican drug cartels brought methamphetamine onto the rural and minimally patrolled reservation in 2000, and many dealers fathered children with Native American women while getting them hooked on the illegal drug. With rampant poverty, many of these women were forced to peddle the drug to support their habit”.

(Source)

If “big oil” trespassed onto Indian land and devastated the population, the kids would be very angry. Perhaps if they could understand that “big drugs” is doing that to an entire country of teenagers they would not want to hand over money to the kid selling on the street corner. The above linked article is one you can print out and leave it where your teen can read it. It might change a few minds.

Teen crisis intervention designed to combat the meth scourge enveloping the country becomes all the more urgent when one realizes all of the tragic consequence that result from the production and sale of that drug. The following story, unfortunately is not rare.

“Wired on methamphetamine and craving more, Ricky Dale Houchens set out one night last November to cook a fresh batch of the drug. He met some buddies in rural Scottsville, Ky., at a trailer that doubled as a crude lab. As the concoction simmered, Houchens, 27, noticed it was getting too hot. When he picked up the pitcher, the bottom gave way and the combustible mixture splashed onto a burner. The resulting blast engulfed Houchens in a ball of fire. “I felt my face just melting,” he recalls.”

Police investigators are stymied by being unable to arrest victims of meth lab explosions.

“Few meth-lab burn victims ever face arrest. Authorities are reluctant to enter hospitals because of the potential chilling effect on doctors and nurses who have a professional responsibility to treat all patients.”

Unfortunately, many teens at risk for meth addiction fail to realize the severe consequences of experimenting with this extremely addictive drug. For some, it is an addiction that they will never defeat.

“Guy recalls…the Kentucky burn patient, it took less than a month after his discharge for him to snort a line of meth again. “I felt bad, like I let everybody down,” he says. But meth is “Lucifer himself.”

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Schools for troubled teens had been discussed around the family table for over a month. Bill and Gale were torn between sending their son Tod, a recovering meth addict, to one of several well recommended troubled teen boarding schools or to allow him to stay in the school that he loved so much.

Tod had spent the last several months in an out patient rehab program for his meth addiction and had managed to stay clean. He had quit hanging out with the troubled teenagers who still encouraged him to get high and had made new friends. Bill and Gale felt that if they could find some additional support for their teen that they would feel more confident allowing him to remain at home.

Parents who are faced with a similar dilemma may want to investigate the many support groups available for meth addicts.CMA or Crystal Meth Anonymous is one such program that offers a 12 step formula.

“How is CMA different from other Twelve Step programs?
We have found that we relate best to other crystal meth addicts because they understand the darkness, paranoia and compulsions of this particular addiction. The Twelve Steps of CMA were adapted from Alcoholics Anonymous. We do not believe we are better or worse than those in other Twelve Step programs. At the same time, many of us fail to fully identify with “a falling-down drunk” or, in the case of a heroin addict, “a nodding-off junkie.” The hyper-extended length and intensity of crystal meth’s effects, be it compulsive cleaning or sexual activity, were unique. Many of us have attended other Twelve Step programs, but the feeling of identification in the Rooms of CMA has helped us to keep coming back. After all, who but another meth addict understands the insanity that accompanies the high and, finally, that seemingly bottomless drop into depression that makes us desperate to use still more?”

(Source)

“At age 16, Caitie C. was pulled over by the Laguna Beach Police and spent a night in jail as a result of her first DWI (driving while intoxicated). “I pulled into a little market to use the pay phone, and there were cops sitting in the parking lot as I drove my car into a pole,” she said. “They did a Breathalyzer and took me in, handcuffed.”

You have to ask why we even allow 16 year old teens to have a car and cell phones and all the other luxuries unless they have exhibited maturity commensurate with the priveleges that they are granted. But teens have come to view these coveted possessions as rights and parents have bought in.

Caitie began drinking began when she was 14. The article also describes Alexis who began drinking when she was 12 and quickly accelerated to a meth addiction that required a complicated intervention. What both girls seemed to have in common was the usual combination of too much time and money and too little interaction with parents.

Teen age drug abuse does not happen in a vacuum. For parents to not recognize aberrant behavior in teens so young suggests a significant family melt down. The article describes it as “alienation”.

“Underage drinking often starts with alienation at home,” according to Wayne Rothwell… He says a sense of isolation sets in and a breakdown of communication develops between the parent and the child.
[..]”Drugs and alcohol are easily available and a way for them to escape from uncomfortable feelings.”
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It used to be teenagers turned to their parents when struggling with “uncomfortable feelings.” Years ago there was an ad campaign that asked parents “It’s midnight. Do you know where your kids are?” Now it is the kids who are wondering where their parents are. And some just give up looking for them.