Red Ribbon Week 2023
Red Ribbon week is celebrated each year in the United States from October 23rd to October 31st, which presents us with another opportunity to talk with children about the dangers of drug use. Throughout the week many of our area schools will be re-enforcing those important drug free messages.
Just as area educators will be stressing the importance of making healthy drug-free choices, this is also a great time for parents and other adults in the lives of kids to similarly talk about the dangers of taking drugs.
Bringing up the dangers of drug use with kids, especially young kids, can be a bit unsettling. It's easy to think having that conversation forces them to grow up before they need to. I completely get it. In fact, when I first started visiting schools years ago to talk about drug dangers, I was concerned about bringing up a drug the children hadn't yet heard of.
To make sure our discussions remained age appropriate, I then just started asking them to tell me some of the drugs they had heard of and knew about. In their young lives, they have heard and been exposed to - whether in real life, on television, online, through video games, or adults and other kids - quite a bit.
This year during Red Ribbon Week, I'd ask us as a community to pay special attention to the horrific and deadly drug of Fentanyl.
Too many people, including children, think prescription drugs are safe because they come from a doctor. The truth is a prescription is given by a doctor to a specific person for a specific reason for a specific duration of time.
Unfortunately, it's not all that uncommon for a child to be around or in the room when one adult offers another adult one of their leftover or unused pain killers. This exposure can contribute to the perception that it's okay to take pills you got from a friend and that didn't come directly from a doctor.
Why this poses a serious problem is, according to the Kansas Board of Pharmacy, 3.7% of Kansas teens report misusing prescription drugs, including opioids, stimulants, and benzodiazepines. A 2020 Kansas Communities That Care Survey reports 74% of the Kansas teens who reported misusing prescription drugs get them from friends and family.
With roughly 411,000 teens in Kansas, that means over 15,000 kids in our state are willing to report they misuse prescription drugs.
It would be naive and inaccurate to believe all those kids live in a metro area. Prescription drug misuse happens in all communities, including ours.
Because prescription drug misuse is an issue, it must be discussed. Particularly since drug trafficking organizations are manufacturing counterfeit prescription pills containing Fentanyl and marketing them directly to kids and young adults in the United States. Their criminal efforts are so effective, and drugs so deadly, that overdose from Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death among Americans between the ages of 18 and 45 years old.
The slogan of One Pill Can Kill is accurate because these counterfeit pills are not manufactured in a pharmaceutical lab where each pill contains the same makeup as the next. One pill may contain nothing harmful, while the very next one contains a lethal dose of Fentanyl. Taking a pill that didn't come from your doctor is tantamount to Russian Roulette.
Too many Kansas have already died from Fentanyl overdoses, including teens from our community and our immediate region.
Those who are marketing this poison to your kids are determined to get them. We all as a community - law enforcement, parents, teachers, youth leaders, coaches, and all other adults in our kids' lives - need to be even more determined to educate and save them. The more we learn and have open conversations with kids about drug dangers, the better prepared they will be when faced with making, what could essentially be, a life or death decision.
More information about Red Ribbon Week can be found at: www.redribbon.org, information about Fentanyl can be found at: https://www.dea.gov/factsheets/fentanyl.
Stay safe and God Bless,
Sheriff David Groves