The above linked article is about
prescription drug abuse seminars being incorporated into school systems. After
reading this article, I feel very strongly that this will be affective. Back in
middle school, I can remember having assemblies about safe sex, drug use,
bullying, and alcohol. It almost seemed as if the assemblies were on repeat and
rotated year to year talking about the same old boring stuff. To me, and I'm
sure the majority of the students, this was never interesting nor impactful to
us. Once I got to high school, however, the assemblies and seminars started to
be more, I guess you can say, mature? Real life situations were presented to
us. I'll never forget my sophomore year. I had heard we were going to a
bullying assembly. Now, immediately I was thinking how great it was to get out
of class but how boring the assembly would be at the same time. But, little did
I know that it would end up being one of the best things that I have ever
attended. A man came to the school and told a story about a police officer that
had came out to his force that he was gay. He told a shocking story about how
his force brutally mocked and harmed him to the point of hospitalization and
severe depression. The whole auditorium was in shock when at the end of this mans
presentation he informed us all that the man he was speaking of was himself. I
had learned from that assembly to never judge a book by its cover. I had also
learned that things like bullying happen in the real world to adults, not just
in school systems with immature children. I had learned that bulling was a real
thing that I never rely grasped the concept of. This story links to this
article in the sense of real life people with real life tragedies coming to
speak to students. This will really hit home for a lot of kids like it did to
me. I know personally I would hear adults talking about prescription drug use
becoming a problem but I never thought anything of it because I had never
experienced it nor knew anyone of my friends that had, therefore I didn't give
it the time of day. The beginning of the article states, “The desperate cry of
a mother finding her 17-year-old son dead from a painkiller and another
prescription drug instantly silences hundreds of Pennsylvania high school
students who listen to her 911 call played at an early morning assembly. That
recording, played as the roughly 500 students look at an urn holding the dead
boy's ashes and photos of dozens of other teens who died of overdoses, is the
gut-punch that anchors a new educational program aimed at combating the rising
abuse of prescription opioid abuse among U.S. young adults”. I feel that those
students experiencing a real life situation, such as the recording and the
ashes, will leave a lasting impact on them and make them realize what an issue
prescription drug use actually is. The article says how “Nationwide,
prescription opioids caused more than 16,000 deaths across all ages in 2013, a
50 percent increase from three years before, according the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. Law enforcement officials say that abuse of the drugs
has also contributed to a spike in heroin usage and deaths from heroin
overdoses as some opioid users switch to the cheaper narcotic”. Personally,
this is something that I did not know. Even scarier is when the article speaks
about teens becoming addicted to pain medication they are given from wisdom
teeth removal procedures. So many teens are getting that procedure now a day,
no wonder that is a problem. With all of this information being showed to the
highschoolers, they will learn the true issue in prescription drugs, something
that is very important to understand. Overall, I am very happy to see the
approach they are making in changing the seriousness of assemblies with
programs revealing real life situations to teens.
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