I’ve been seeing comments on Facebook and Twitter about a National Leadership Conference for Young People in Recovery that’s being held right now in Denver. Young People in Recovery is a national organization that invites people to establish chapters in their town that provide support for teens and young adults in recovery and teaches them how to act as advocates for social change.
As I look through Facebook, I see mentions of young people flying in to Denver from Young People in Recovery Chapters all over the country: New Jersey, Texas, Chicago, North Carolina, Philadelphia, Wisconsin, Maine, and more.
From the pictures of these teams of people arriving in Denver, there’s a lot of scrubbed faces and enthusiastic teens involved in this activity. In their home towns, they put on all kinds of events and races and attend street fairs to distribute drug prevention meetings. They advocate for better care for the addicted, more funding for treatment, and organize support at a grassroots level.
There are high schools dedicated to providing high schoolers in recovery with sober environments in which they can finish their educations. There are more than 30 of these schools, with nearly a dozen in Wisconsin, the pioneer in starting these schools. The Association of Recovery Schools provides guidance and accreditation.
Students attend these schools after they go through treatment. Class sizes are small and lesson plans flexible, as they may be playing catch up with their educations. Here, they don’t face the questions they might have to field from their former classmates. Everyone has this characteristic in common: they are coming back from addiction.
We need more of these positive movements that help people leave addiction behind. There should be more community support. The more these young people share their stories of how they lost so much, so young, the more their peers will learn how much can be lost by fooling around with drugs.
What is sad, really, is that we have gotten to the point that we are losing so many young people to serious drug abuse that develops into addiction. At an age when they should just be concerned with grades and dating, some of our young people are having to deal with these life-threatening situations.
What lesson can we take from this? Parents, please educate your children thoroughly on the dangers of drug use. And don’t wait until they are in middle school to start. When they arrive in middle school, they will probably start seeing or hearing about other students using drugs. They need to have a clear understanding of what drugs really do to a person before this influence arrives in their schools.
We have plenty of information available to help you with this task. Please start early. Please learn about the drugs they may see or hear about so you can educate them. You can find some of the materials you will need here: www.narconon.org/drug-abuse/parent-center.html.