I can’t find a link yet, but like I said in the header, NBC News did a big story tonight about a school district in Ohio that is doing training sessions for parents and students about how to use Narcan (naloxone, an opiate antidote if you didn’t know) and also giving away kits to any parents who want them.
Thing is, this program was aimed at JUNIOR HIGH KIDS and they’re even going to put kits in elementary schools! The reason I’m posting this here and not elsewhere is that two big questions were not addressed.
Who is selling recreational drugs, especially opiates, to children, and why aren’t they being arrested and prosecuted;
and
Where are these children getting the money to buy dope at school?
Thanks for pointing out my typo, in time to correct it, no less.
Of course, they had to interview an attractive middle-class mother who thinks her 14-year-old son OD’ed the first time he ever tried drugs - an oxycodone tablet laced with fentanyl. No, Mom, it was not the first time your son did drugs; get your head out of the sand. Opiates are not first-line drugs of abuse.
That’s true, and as for the elementary school Narcan kits, I’m guessing that the emphasis is on employees or parents who show up stoned. I hope so, anyway.
When my brother was in 5th grade, one of his classmates came to school drunk (he was not a kid people would have expected to do that, either) and that kid never heard the end of it. p.s. This would have been in the late 1970s.
This was my first thought as well. AFAIK nobody is selling handguns to elementary school kids. There are still ‘what to do if you find a gun’ discussions.
I know I was around 14 when I first heard of people taking drugs at school. No one I knew personally ( I wasn’t that cool) but friends of friends.
I was older when I heard of anyone doing anything stronger than weed, but the drug culture of 1990s britain is not the same as 2020s US (especially after a couple of decades of US drug companies flooding the market with opioids)
So this is not because they think 8 year olds are frequently out buying smack. They are putting narcan in first aid kits in elementary schools as there should be narcan in first aid kits everywhere. Not just the locations there are likely to be a lot of opiod users.
So one reason for this is textbook bad law making. There are indeed laws making it a more serious crime to deal drugs near a school. But when they made those laws they decided to make the distance where you can receive an extra sentence for dealing drugs super long. So it covered most the town a school in is in, and basically impossible for a drug dealer to avoid. So rather than being an actual disincentive to dealing drugs near schools it just increased all (or most) drug dealing sentences and did nothing to actually discourage selling drugs near schools.
I’ll say that opiates are frequently the first drugs that people will abuse. Not sure how much among children but adults who have never done recreational drugs before get hooked on them all the time.
I can imagine that if parents have these drugs, and they’ve been overprescribed nationwide for years, it’s probably not too difficult for kids to get them.
So basically, yeah they often are “first-line drugs of abuse”.
Also? As sad as it is, it’s not a bad idea to train kids how to use Narcan (at least the nasal spray) in areas where opiate abuse is an epidemic, because they could very well save a parent or other relative that way.
That’s true, and always has been. Don’t forget the liquor cabinet, which is chock full of a drug that is illegal for minors. I found out that my old church never locked their doors, until they figured out that some teenagers in the neighborhood (and yes, they did find out WHICH teenagers; they didn’t go there) were sneaking into the building and drinking the communion wine. This would have been in the 1970s or 1980s.
However, you can’t buy fentanyl-laced oxycodone tablets (which is how the 14-year-old allegedly died) at your friendly neighborhood pharmacy with a prescription, or at least not the legal variety.
Exactly. This isn’t about saving children who OD (not that that can’t happen and that this might help), but rather that the first person to find someone overdosing might be a 13 year old, and so maybe 13 year olds should know about narcan.
Maybe that person is a parent, caregiver, older sibling, etc. As I understand it Narcan is extremely time sensitive and a 10 year old administering it immediately is better than telling them to call 911.
And while we’re at it, there are plenty of things we teach children that they genuinely won’t be able to use for years. Why do we teach the structure of government in elementary school, when they won’t vote until they’re 18? Because they’re going to use that knowledge eventually.
ive told the story where I managed to accidentally end up drunk and high at 7:30 am in high school,…but when I went to high school in the90s school hours drinking was so bad that they were going to get school-branded water bottles and ban all non school obtained outside drinks
It didn’t happen because of various problems but enough people got the hint and the problem dropped off
The teenage brain being what it is, I was not surprised when Students Against Drunk Driving decided to rename itself Students Against Destructive Decisions.
Years ago, a colleague gave a presentation at her kids’ elementary school about the difference between medicine, drugs, and poison, and that there are many things that could be classified as any of those if they are used properly, or improperly as the case may be.
