DRUGS JUST KILL, WARNS MR. CLEAN

Although he goes by the name Mr. Clean now, Mike Ryan wasn't always
able to live up to that squeaky image.

Once a drug addict who spent years in and out of jail, Ryan has spent
the last several years trying to make up for his past by helping
vulnerable kids with their futures.

As the founder and CEO of Clean Scene, an Edmonton-based drug
education group, Ryan has talked to more than 200,000 people at 200
schools and events since 2002 in an effort to encourage youth to make
positive choices.

"At Clean Scene, we're all recovering addicts that have been speaking
publicly. For me, that's 15 years of speaking to young people across
the province," Ryan said at a community presentation in Grande
Prairie Monday night.

"Everyone needs to know that if you put this stuff in your body, it's
going to cause some damage. There's a reason you cough the first time
you do drugs. It's your body saying, 'Get this stuff out.' There is
so much that parents and kids need to know. If you're going to be a
druggie, you might as well put a bullet in your head because that's
what it's going to do to you."

Ryan, who was born and raised in Alberta, first got hooked on
morphine and other painkillers during a stay in the hospital as a
child. His first youth convictions were at age 13 and he spent more
than six years incarcerated for drug trafficking and armed robbery.

After his release from jail in 1989, he ended his involvement with
drugs and has stayed clean for 18 years.

"An addiction is a compulsive disorder. It's not something you have
willpower over. No one wants to be an addict but there are only three
places an addict ends up - jail, an institution or dead," Ryan said,

"I spent 6 1/2 years of my life locked away because of my involvement
with the drug scene. It can happen to any child. I came from a good
family. The opportunity to score drugs is there. Every community has
got it and they usually come cheap."

Ryan is in Grande Prairie to help kick off National Addictions Week,
which runs Nov. 19-25. Grande Prairie RCMP, the City of Grande
Prairie's Community Crime Prevention Unit and the Grande Prairie and
Area Drug Action Committee teamed up to bring him here.

While most people walk into one of Ryan's sessions expecting a lesson
on crystal meth, marijuana and crack cocaine, Ryan says street drugs
are only part of the issue. The two leading drug killers in North
America are even more readily available.

"The number-one killer drug in North America isn't meth and it isn't
crack cocaine. It's tobacco," Ryan said, adding tobacco kills 30
times more people than any other drug. Similarly, alcohol is the
second-leading cause of death by drugs, killing five times more
people than street drugs.

"We need to do a lot more about drug prevention and include tobacco
and alcohol as well. These two are drugs, too, and we need to start
changing our thought process around this."

Although peer pressure has long been a factor in kids deciding to
pick up a cigarette or a drink for the first time, Ryan says parental
approval has become a major contributing factor in recent years.

"To put it simply, if the parent is a user, the child is 300 per cent
more likely to become a user as well," he said.

"Also, many people don't know that it's illegal to advertise
prescription drugs in Canada. A number of companies still do that and
that makes young people think that drugs can solve any problem. We
live in a culture of drugs that is the single worst time in history.
I don't just talk about street drugs because they are only part of
the problem."

It's a problem, he says, that can be helped by increased education.
While Ryan and his co-presenter can only realistically get to about
80 schools each per year, he wants to be able to reach so many more.

"The challenges we have are education and prevention, harm reduction,
treatment and enforcement. Education isn't just posters and
pamphlets. It's people working with people," he said.

"We can do more if we get kids to understand what they're doing to
themselves. It's not just kids, we have to educate society. I have a
lot of friends who have recovered and gone on with their lives, but
we're in the minority. If we can save one kid each time we go out,
that's something amazing. There are too few of us willing to get out
there and talk about it. Most of us are embarrassed about our pasts.
I'm not embarrassed. I don't like what I did and I'm not proud of it,
but it was 21 years of me being stupid. We need to get out there
every chance we get."

The minimum standard for any Clean Scene speaker is he or she must be
sober for at least five years and already be out in the community
trying to make a difference. Currently, Ryan is working to recruit a
few more people but has to wait a couple of years before they're
ready to meet those criteria.

"Using younger people is the future but we're not quite there yet," he said.

"We have to be very careful about the message we give. It's not easy
work but we want to be in every school in Alberta every year. That
might not be realistic but it's a repetitive message. We need to
focus on kids and empower them. They're disempowering each other
every day so we have to do anything we can to give kids the right message."