GRAPHIC DISPLAY USED TO MAKE POINT ON ALCOHOL, DRUGS

SMITHS FALLS -- A 17-year-old boy is dead and his friend charged with
impaired driving causing death after two carloads of partying teens
collided on the high school's doorstep.

Horrified classmates arriving for school Thursday watched as firefighters
cut the bloodied injured from the crumpled car, paramedics worked to revive
them and police interviewed the distraught driver.

That's how the story would read.

But the dramatic car crash, a girl's cocaine overdose and a fight between
two teens were staged by Smiths Falls District Collegiate Institute
students and the Smiths Falls Community Focus Coalition with real police
officers, paramedics and doctors.

The Drug Awareness Week event aimed to show teens the consequences of the
choices they make about alcohol, drugs and violence.

Grade 12 student Mike Donohue was the "dead" youth, a shard of glass from
the car's windshield sticking out of his bloodied temple. He recounted how
he got into a car with his drunk friend and didn't buckle up.

"Not that it matters now," he said. "The car is totalled and so am I."

"Be aware of the consequences of doing drugs and drinking," Donohue said
after the assembly. "It could happen to anybody."

A second scenario had a teenage girl collapse, her friends telling teachers
that she'd snorted a line of cocaine.

Dr. Elspeth Kushnir told the teens that she's gotten used to trying to
resuscitate people who have overdosed on drugs or alcohol or crashed a car
but she will never get used to telling their families.

"I can't tell you never to do any of these risky things," Kushnir told the
students. "You're kids, you'll want to try. Look out for each other. Please
don't let me be the one who has to call your mother."

Kushnir noted that she's seen more cocaine at the town hospital than when
she worked at a major Toronto health centre. Doctors now look at teens
showing up with chest pains - a symptom of cocaine use - with suspicion.

Users have no idea how toxic it is, she said. A single line could be enough
to send a sensitive person into cardiac arrest and buyers have no way of
knowing what's really in it.

The scenarios weren't overblown, said Rick Warren, manager of the Smiths
Falls ambulance base. All those incidents can, and have, resulted from a
single field party.

Four years ago, a devastating crash after a party sent two teens to city
hospitals by ambulance. Many more party-goers turn up in the emergency room
with overdoses, injuries from fights and requests for the morning-after pill.

Alcohol is the number one substance teens are using, FOCUS co-ordinator Les
Voakes said. Marijuana is number two and everything else is a distant
third, Voakes said.

Published in Section A, page 4 in the Friday, November 21, 2003 edition of
the Brockville Recorder & Times.