Videos that Tell the Story : Teenagers and Drugs

I have a ten year old. She is a beautiful, bright little girl. I have to admit, though, that the years ahead scare the crap out of me. She is currently in fifth grade and, starting in January, she is going to learn about sex during her health class. She is going to be in the middle school next year. So not only do I have to talk to her about sex but I have to talk to her about drugs and alcohol. I am starting my homework now – searching the web, reading books and initiating conversations with family and friends on what has helped them.

Experimentation with alcohol and drugs during adolescence is common. Parents of children in or near their teenage years often cite drugs and alcohol experimentation and use as one of their greatest worries. Each year the National Institute on Drug Abuse in conjunction with the University of Michigan conduct a survey which studies the extent of and beliefs about drug use among 8th, 10th and 12th graders. Whereas the survey has indicated that eighth, tenth and twelfth graders across the country are continuing to show a gradual decline in the proportions reporting use of illicit drugs, the numbers, to me, are still astounding. The proportion of 8th graders reporting use of an illicit drug at least one in the 12 months prior to the survey was 13% in 2007; 28 % for 10th graders and 36% for 12th graders.

Resources abound on the Internet offering information and expert advice. Useful websites include:

Parents – The Anti-Drug:
www.theantidrug.com

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA):
www.nida.nih.gov

NIDA for teens:
teens.drugabuse.gov

About.com:
parentingteens.about.com/od/teendruguse/Teen_Drug_Use_and_Abuse.htm

What is missing, however, on most of these sites is a well-rounded perspective on the situation. Expert information is great but I also want to hear from other individuals and families that have been through the trenches on the drug and alcohol issue. Whether it is useful advice from parents that have successfully had productive conversations with their children as a means of prevention to those poor families that have lived through a horrible addiction situation, I want to learn from them. Very little of that exists on the Internet today and where it does, it is incredibly hard to find.

I did find a series of 20 episodes from a former heroin addict, Sherry, who shares her personal struggle with addiction, homelessness, and all the behaviors associated with supporting an addiction on the street. Some of the 20 videos are powerful, some of them are not, but it is a first person account of how and why she got addicted and how she got herself off the streets. I put all twenty episodes together on my blog www.lipstickwisdom.com/blog. I had to scour through multiple web sites in order to pull the twenty episodes together. It took a while.

I also found a video of a son, Johnny Irwin, who responds to his mom’s now famous (although I had never heard about it) “Dear Johnny” letter about drugs and alcohol eight years later after the letter. Johnny’s mom, Marsha Rosenbaum, is director emerita of the Safety First Project and director emerita of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance. From 1977 to 1995, Rosenbaum was the principal investigator on National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded studies of heroin addiction, methadone maintenance treatment, MDMA (Ecstasy), cocaine, and drug use during pregnancy. She has written more on the issue at www.drugpolicy.org/libary/staffwritten/rosenbaum.cfm.

I also found several student films on the subject that explore the pressures teenagers today face from their perspective. Each of these videos offered me some information, some insights.
It was incredibly time consuming to find videos that I thought useful and informative and offered advice from the personal, not expert, perspective. I did also gather some useful expert videos together for a one stop resource of video information.

In addition to finding, sorting and organizing videos from the Internet, my partner at Lipstick Wisdom, Kathy Egan, and I produced four videos on teenagers and risky behavior. The videos offer insights from one family, two mothers and an expert. We, unfortunately, cannot do this for every topic but hope to be able to produce more videos in the near future.

If you or someone you know would like information on teenagers and drugs from both a personal story as well as an expert basis, check it out at www.lipstickwisdom.com/blog. And to all of us with teenagers or soon to be teenagers – good luck!!!