DRUG EDUCATION ALONE HOLDS LITTLE VALUE

I have to give District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett and Sheriff Frank
Cousins credit.

The two of them are doing more than the usual combination of press
releases about the dangers of illegal drugs and threats of zero
tolerance for dealers.

They've declared a personal war on drugs and are taking
it not just to the street but beyond, to the offices of
school principals and superintendents to editorial
board rooms of newspapers and to an area auditorium.
They, along with their 16-member Essex County
Anti-Crime Council, will be hosting a conference at
Merrimack College Jan. 13 titled, "The Heroin/Opiate
Epidemic: Raising Awareness, Accessing Resources."

I'm all for raising awareness -- the right kind of awareness. Sadly,
when local kids get caught, after getting caught up in this stuff, the
pressure from parents and sometimes even their coaches and teachers is
to block publicity about it. The press is accused of "ruining the
life" of a kid as if news stories are more damaging than the drugs
themselves.

But awareness of the damage and trouble drugs can bring to a person
you know is far more effective than listening to generalities. Sure,
it's worth hearing that drugs can kill you. So can a car. It's just
that the message to slow down and not drink and drive takes on much
more urgency when it is illustrated by your good friend getting
wrapped around a telephone pole.

Still, even if this conference features personal examples, like four
young people in Peabody who have died of overdoses in the last 13
months, I wonder how effective it can be. The district attorney and
the sheriff say the best way to combat this "horrendous problem" is
with education. But a generation ago, Len Bias snorted away not just a
can't-miss career with the Boston Celtics, but his life as well.

A generation later, we fear Peabody's Jeff Allison, a can't-miss pro
baseball prospect, might do the same. Please don't tell me those guys
never had any drug education.

When I hear that education is the key, I think back about 20 years to
conversations with a veteran cop on the Lynn Drug Task Force. The
problem wasn't education, he said. Kids know all about drugs. Some of
them knew more than he did. They knew they were dangerous and could
addict you or kill you. But they're a thrill, you know. And what's
life without some thrills?

What the kids lacked, he said, was a moral code. An ability, or even a
reason, to delay gratification. And while a teacher or a coach can
sometimes inject a bit of that into a kid, the only place it really
takes hold, or doesn't take hold, he said, is at home.

A few years earlier, during a brief, one-semester teaching career at
Triton Regional High School, I saw it myself. It took less than a week
to find out who my problem kids were. It took about another week to
find out why they frequently came to school stoned. All you had to do
was call the house and find out that they were in the care of an
uncle, maybe an older sibling or some other member of an extended
family or friend network. Those people didn't want to hear about
trouble at school. They just wanted to be left alone. No amount of
education was going to change that bleak reality for the kid.

When I hear education is the key, I think about TV pushers for
designer prescription drugs. Pills that help us concentrate, that make
us potent, that lift us out of real or imagined depression, that pick
us up, that settle us down, that "make us feel like ourselves again."
I hear about the hit show "Desperate Housewives," which reflects the
reality that Ritalin, the drug prescribed for kids who have attention
deficit disorder, is now the latest "mother's little helper."

There's some education. No wonder the kids think it's OK to get hooked
on mind-altering substances. If we're taking Ritalin and Xanax, where
do we get off preaching to them about OxyContin or even heroin?

I hear education is the key and I think back only four years ago when
area police officers, former District Attorney Kevin Burke and U.S.
Attorney Donald Stern were talking about how heroin was cheaper and
purer than ever, how it was snaring younger and younger people, how
they needed to work with hospitals to get better reporting on heroin
overdoses and deaths, and how education is the key ... and I start
feeling like I'm in an echo chamber.

Education is good, but it is just information. Information is not a
value, and it is definitely not a relationship. If a war on drugs is
to have any hope of success, it must enlist more than cops, coaches
and teachers. It has to enlist the parents.