Wasn't it the St. Pete paper that always had a story about straight inc in it every damn weekend or something? I know the Washington Post sure did... well, in keeping with tradition, the Northwest Indiana Times is keeping pace now. Yet ANOTHER article plugging PFC.
PLEASE STOP WRITING ALL THIS FLUFFY STUFF ABOUT PFC!!!!!!!!!!! How bout some 'other side' stories? Are you deaf? Do you care? Do you even have ONE clue?
It's like, Hey folks, this place will WASH your kid's brain, legally, eventhough you'd go to jail if you did it. Just $60,000 + meals, travel, doc visits, court etc...
Here's the newest one. Sorry about how long it is, but there's some 'goodies' in there, weird how it sounds like straight inc eh?
FD
It Might Be My Child
Teen Drug Use
By Kathy MacNeil
Date posted online: Friday, February 01, 2008
Teens and Drugs
By Sharon Cawood
Because we continue to see the rise of drug use by our young people all across the county, the Porter County Substance Abuse Council has made up a helpful “what to look for” list for parents to use as a guide in case they suspect that their child might be using drugs or alcohol.
These are things to look for:
-Older friends and/or a change of friends
-Pay attention to lack of emotion and a consistent negative attitude
-Pay attention to how their money is spent
-Drastic change in style, such as clothing or music
-Missing spoons, torn-up soda cans, little Ziploc bags, small pieces of foil and small straws
-Avoidance of conversation, claiming to be misunderstood
-Long sleeves or inappropriate clothing for the weather
-Sleeping more or less than usual
-Always having somewhere to be, persistent phone calls, anxious to leave any family event, constantly being preoccupied
-Bad acne outbreaks, urinary tract infections due to toxins
-Consistently missing school on Monday, never Friday
-Females not menstruating regularly
-Valuable personal items “missing” or “borrowed”
-Scratching or picking at skin, and a dry red nose and face
-Check cars, bedrooms, closets, car trunks and stereos for drug residue
-Check for seeds in car seats and in coat pockets
Here are some helpful hints for parents:
-Your child needs you, their parent—not another friend.
-Remember, your kids may be offered drugs at school or at their workplace on a regular basis. If you don’t talk to them about drugs . . . someone else will.
-Between 3 and 6 p.m. is statistically the most dangerous times for drug use among teens—make sure your teen is safe with someone you can trust.
-Know your child’s friends’ first and last names.
-Give your child a reason/excuse to say no—my parent drug tests, my mom will call your parent, the car will be taken away, etc.
-Keep track of prescription medication.
-Don’t believe the statement “They’re not my drugs, I’m keeping them for a friend.”
-Enforcing rules NOW will help your kids’ lives in the future.
The Porter County Substance Abuse Council also sells $5.00 drug-testing kits to parents who have a teen living with them that they want to test. The kit tests for marijuana, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and methamphetamines, and parents may purchase it and take it home to test their child when they feel it is necessary.
For more information:
Porter County Substance Abuse Council
Grants, drug-testing kits for parents, drug and alcohol information
219.462.0946
www.portercountysac.org.
Porter County Drug Task Force
If you have information on drug dealers or users, call
219.465.3629
Porter Starke Services
Adult and adolescent drug outpatient programs
219.531.3500
Sharon Cawood is the director of the Porter County Substance Abuse Council.
Substance Abuse and Parenting: What Parents Need to Know
By Daniel Franz
Parenting is a tough and demanding job, full of ups and downs, hard work and enjoyment. For most of us, the measure of our success as a parent is encapsulated in the child, or children, we are raising. Some of the information you are about to read may be frightening, or cause you to think, “Not my child.” This information is intended to educate you, not frighten you, and for you to realize that, “It might be my child,” but that there is always help and hope.
Today we are confronted with staggering national statistics that indicate more and more young people are using drugs at younger ages, sometimes as early as age 10. By the end of the 7th grade, 44 percent of all youth have experimented with at least one drug. The average age for first time use of marijuana is 13 years, 11 months. For those who report experimenting, over one third of these young people will become regular substance users by the end of the 8th grade. All of this, before your child even enters high school, where peer pressure is at its strongest. All of this, at a critical time when a young person’s brain is most susceptible to the negative influences of drug use—during this critical period of development, the changes in brain chemistry brought on by substance use can have long-standing negative effects that last into adulthood.
Although teens, in a national survey, rank drugs and substance use as their number one concern—above social pressures, academic pressures, crime and violence—80 percent of parents don’t believe marijuana and alcohol are readily available to their kids! It is a frustrating and frightening dichotomy when young people are asking for help in a crucial area of their lives, yet their parents don’t recognize that they even need help, or that it is a concern.
So then, what do parents need to know? What can be done to help prevent our children from becoming a part of these national statistics?
Know the substances that are out there—and know that they are all accessible:
A common concerning statement we hear from parents today is, “I smoked marijuana when I was growing up—it didn’t hurt me.” Marijuana today is a far cry from what it was a decade or more ago. Marijuana today is dozens of times stronger, more dangerous, and more addictive than in the past. It truly is a gateway drug that leads teens to try stronger and more dangerous substances.
Technology has also yielded greater accessibility to a variety of drugs, and ideas on how to use them. Be aware of your children’s Internet usage—what they are viewing, who they are instant-messaging and emailing, and what is on both their and their friends’ MySpace accounts. If you allow your child to use a cell phone, know how to check the phone’s voicemail and text messaging—do so; check it regularly to know what is going on.
We have seen an increase in the use of prescription and over-the-counter drugs over the past 1 to 2 years. Many of today’s cough and cold suppressants contain dextromethorphan, or DXM, or the “D” in cold medicines. Taken at normal, prescribed dosages is helpful in managing cold symptoms, taken in excessive dosages, DXM is a potent hallucinogen with potentially lethal side effects. Coricidin Cold and Cough, or “Triple C,” or “skittles,” when taken a box or two boxes at a time, as some teens have been encouraged to do, causes a biological reaction in the liver that can shut it down and cause death. Any of these cough medicines when taken in combination with alcohol can have similar fatal effects. Parents, know what your kids are buying at the store or bringing home; look in their rooms for discarded boxes or bottles of cold medicine. If your child has multiple empty containers in his or her room, it’s probably not because of a cold.
The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) issued information in the past year indicating that prescription drug use is also on the rise. Vicodin, Xanax, Codeine, Demerol and Oxycontin all have potent effects on the adolescent body—when taken with alcohol, the effects are magnified and the danger is increased. Where do our children find these substances? Who are today’s drug dealers? We are—the adults closest to them are often the ones inadvertently supplying them with prescription medicine. Many of us have leftover or current prescriptions in our medicine cabinets that we have long forgotten. But our kids have not. They know whose medicine cabinet contains what drug, and the Internet has told them which ones can be used to get high, and what the average selling price should be. Parents, if you have these medicines in your medicine cabinet, get rid of them. If you are using them as part of a prescription, monitor them, and know when some are missing.
Know the signs and symptoms:
As parents, we are all blessed with a “sixth sense” or a parent’s intuitive “gut instinct” when our children are born. If your parent “gut” is telling you something is wrong, don’t deny it. Verify it. If your child’s appearance changes drastically, or if their “good friends” disappear and new friends you’re not so sure about begin to appear, if their grades suddenly plummet, or if suddenly they give up their favorite sport or activity, find out why. These are all signs, but no list of signs is all-inclusive. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.
Know what to do about it:
If you think something is wrong, if your parent gut tells you that something is not quite right, talk about it. Ask your children about their friends, their grades, their activities, what they are doing. Trust what they tell you, but verify it. We all want to trust our children to do what is right, at the right time, under the difficult circumstances of adolescence and peer pressure. So we need to verify that trust by looking in their rooms, checking where they are going, and possibly even asking them to submit an occasional urine drug screen.
Be involved with your child. There is no better preventative measure. There is no better resource when times get tough than to have a strong relationship with your child. This comes from spending time with them on their terms, but also from encouraging them to be a part of your world as well. Parenting, and having a strong relationship with your child, is a give and take. Of course, there also comes a point where a parent must be a parent, and not their adolescent child’s best friend.
Finally, if none of this works—if you are not able to understand what is really going on with your child, or if you know there is a problem and it is outside of your control—ask for help. There are resources available to help in your time of need.
Daniel Franz is the program director at Pathway Family Center in Chesterton, which offers confidential assessments to determine the nature of a child’s issues, and provides direction to make things better. For more information about Pathway Family Center, call 219.926.2583 (or toll-free, 24 hours a day: 800.261.4605) or visit pathwayfamilycenter.org.
NWI Parent talks to:
Sarah Duda, 21
Chesterton
I started using drugs when I was seventeen. I was addicted to heroin. The boyfriend that I was with, that’s who got me started on all the drugs that I was using. I thought I was in love, and I thought we were going to stay together forever, because he was my first real boyfriend. One night he told me to snort this, and I didn’t even ask what it was, I just did it. Later I found out that it was heroin. My parents took me to Pathway [Family Center] in 2004 and I was there for 9 months. I haven’t used drugs since.
In high school I was a good student; I hung out with the good group, the nice people, had good friends, and then all of a sudden I wasn’t going to school, I wasn’t hanging out with my normal friends. I was losing weight, I was moody, and just basically didn’t even talk to my parents. So they knew something was wrong. And then finally I came home one night and I was high and my parents knew something was up, and my dad kicked me out of my house. So for two weeks all I did was get high, and then I came home one day to get the rest of my stuff, and my mom told me that I either had to go to “rehab” (I didn’t know it was Pathway at the time), or to jail, so I said, “I’ll go to rehab.”
I think a big part of the program is that you are in there with a bunch of other teens, and it’s not just like a one-on-one therapy. You get other teens’ perspective. They have this thing called Peer Staff, where it’s kids that were in the program that have graduated, and that helped me out because I could see how others stayed clean and sober.
I work at Pathway now. I’m what they call the assessment specialist, where when you bring in your teen, I sit down and talk to them and see exactly what’s going on and what drugs they’re using. Because it’s a lot easier for them to relate to me, since I’ve been through all that, instead of an adult who hasn’t. It gets very intimidating for teens, because they think they’re going to get into trouble. So with me, it’s a lot easier for them to open up.
Mike Prendergast
Valparaiso
In 2003, we got a call from [my daughter Megan’s] school counselor at Valpo. I get there and everybody’s crying and so I figured that maybe she had gotten in trouble at school, and that we’ll get this resolved. And then [the counselor] said, “Megan, you’re going to have to tell your dad why we’re here.” That was hard for her, and she couldn’t, and was embarrassed and crying, so I said, “Hey pumpkin, to be honest with you, whatever’s happened has happened, and we need to address it and move on; I don’t have any control over what’s already happened, and whatever you tell me I’m not going to love you any less.” So she said that she had been using heroin.
I’m an agent with the FBI. I’m looking at people that are selling and buying drugs, not people that are using. She was losing some weight, and some of the other behaviors, we just figured it was young girls’ hormones. But I didn’t have a clue that she was using. The choices that she made to use were god-awful but the other stuff was responsible.
So we got Megan into the detox program at Porter Memorial Hospital, and then we did some looking around for other possibilities for her. Somebody had given us information about Pathway Family Center down in Indianapolis, so we drove down to Indianapolis and made a few calls to see the facility and actually get an idea of what was going on.
We came back, and several families had contacted us from the Northwest Indiana area that had kids in the program and were giving us their experiences and support. We went right from the hospital to Porter-Starke to register her in a program called intensive outpatient. We put some restrictions on her behavior, and we actually allowed her to go to the prom. A few days after that, we got called by her counselor and she told us, “I’m not going to beat around the bush; Megan’s in jeopardy, and you have to do something.” We heard from some of her friends that they had relapsed and used something at the prom.
We made the decision then to bring her directly down to Pathway without her knowing. We got her in the car, and made a pretense that we were going to school, but had clothes hidden in the back, assuming that they would take her at Pathway. So we went down for an evaluation and an intake. And she was livid, and tried to get out of the backseat and I struggled with her and she just sat there after venting at us and couldn’t believe that we were going to take her someplace. We got down to Pathway, where they did an assessment and they took her in, and we literally said our goodbyes and left.
We put her into the program and got going with the family sessions. My son came up from Bloomington, where he was in school at the time. He met us and we went down and participated fully in the program.
Megan was going to turn 18 in November, and she was progressing well. She went out and did presentations at schools down there, and was really speaking highly of the program. We told her, “If you decide to leave the program when you turn 18, you’re on your own, but we’re going to finish this program for all of us, and we’re expecting you to do the same. You’ll be welcome at home, but you won’t be allowed to live at home.” But Megan and another girl who also was turning 18 left Pathway. Megan called friends and got back up to Valpo.
After Megan left, her mother, brother and I continued the program, and graduated the Pathway program. They were encouraging the whole family, not just Megan; it was her behaviors that affected all of us, so we’d have to deal with it. That’s why we tried not to enable, and held her accountable for stuff. She realized that if she left she wasn’t living under our roof, and we didn’t provide a car or clothes or anything, and she realized what she had. They dealt with the whole family issue. Megan needed to increase her self-esteem; she needed to become more aware of what her part in our relationship was as a daughter and a sister.
She kind of just floundered around for awhile, went from house to house, and we saw her at Christmastime, and Thanksgiving briefly. In March, she was living with her boyfriend’s parents and she reached out to us and said, “Why don’t I try to go to Wheeler High School? . . .We developed trust again with her . . . We had a graduation.
She didn’t finish the program, but we did, and are still committed to it. She’s obviously making much better choices, and she moved back home with me in Valpo in May. She’s working, and being accountable, and I don’t have any reason to believe that she’s having any difficulties with addictions. When social issues overwhelm her, she sees a counselor and deals with that, and I’ll be supportive of that until I die.
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