Young children need to hear about dangers of drugs
In the midst of a drug epidemic, we, both as a community and a state, spend an awful lot of time contemplating drug abuse in an after-the-fact fashion.
We consider the various rehabilitation methods for people addicted to drugs, argue about the possibilities of harsher sanctions for drug dealers, and listen to stories from the loved ones of fatal overdose victims. Throughout all of these debates, however, it seems we tend to overlook those deemed most at-risk for drug abuse: Our youth.
The truth is, children around 10 to 15 years old typically experience the greatest risk for drug abuse, and, more often than most of us would probably like to realize, some children will begin abusing drugs even before their tenth birthdays. It is appalling to think that a child in elementary school knows how to obtain and abuse heroin, pain pills, or methamphetamine, but, as crazy as it sounds, it is true and supported by various scholarly studies.
Drug prevention education for youth should start in elementary school and end on graduation day, because preventing drug abuse before it begins is almost surely easier and less costly than dealing with it after-the-fact. Research continues to support that fact-driven drug prevention education for young people, as opposed to a get tough, just say no approach, plays a significant role in helping them refuse drugs the first time, reducing rates of initial use.
Our schools ought to empower children to make smart, informed choices about drugs, which is especially important for the many children who grow up around parents or siblings abusing drugs and, subsequently, lack healthy, nurturing home environments.
According to numerous works of scholarly literature, schools would be better equipped to prevent drug abuse among children if they add drug prevention education to their curriculum and provide extracurricular programs about drug prevention that bring students and parents together. Such endeavors not only give children the information necessary to make educated decisions about drugs, but they help ensure the effective conversations about drug prevention transcend the school environment.
I remember when I was a high school senior, and I took some time to think about how much of my life I would have spent in school up until graduation. If you do the math, you will find that, from birth through high school graduation, children spend almost half of their entire lives in school, which presents a significant opportunity for our schools to make real impacts on our youth, even those who go home to inadequate family environments. By making school into a nurturing, stable environment for children, our teachers and administrators then have a platform to more easily condition objectively appropriate behavior, such as deciding against abusing drugs.
Otherwise, we will continue to watch our children grow into what they grew up with and dollar after dollar float away due to losses of productivity and crime as a result of scathing drug abuse. All we need to do is start young. A child born into a high-crime or drug-ridden community does not deem him or her a lost cause. There are plenty of accounts of successful individuals rising from nothing to something, likely because they were naturally driven, resilient individuals. Imagine how many more success stories we could read about if we actually gave children the skills to become more than just products of their environments.
Our community needs to rethink its approach to the drug epidemic. If we continue to simply focus on treatment, the problem will not desist, because we will keep overlooking its beginnings. Our local politicians and school administrators ought to reorient and revamp drug prevention education in schools in such ways that regularly empower children to make informed decisions about drug abuse, bring children and parents together to effectively discuss drug abuse, and, overall, consistently engage children throughout all grade levels.
A resident of Point Marion, Garlick is a graduate student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.