funder of the future we're going to tell you about that but i do want to say that i encourage all of you to really listen closely to the presenters that we have for you this afternoon there's a lot of really important information that you're going to hear this afternoon that pertains directly to you as middle schoolers and you know as at p t s and part of our school you know we really focus on three things achievement character and community the core to be clean program addresses all three of those and most importantly character and community how can you be the best version of yourself and then how can you give back and support the community you live in as a good outstanding citizen so without further ado i want to throw this over to two of our student leaders of the program of the call to be clean program who are going to discuss what it actually is and that is ben yates who has been ben can you stand up and kaylee parker haley can can you stand up they're going to share out the majority of the information with you today before they go though i just want to let you know something we're going to collect some of your we want to and we're going to collect your feedback on this afternoon's assembly because we want to make sure that this assembly is the best that it possibly can be for you and so your feedback is really going to be taken into consideration for seventh graders next year and the year following so i just i want to thank you in advance for being a great audience and i want to thank you in advance for really basis think about it each day we make thousands of choices one study of cornell said that on average we make two hundred twenty two decisions about food alone imagine how many more we make about our favorite school our interactions with our friends and our choice of netflix shows to watch many of these decisions are made based on what we've seen from our parents teachers siblings and friends now we are in eighth grade we are faced with more important decisions jayson's our parents and teachers can control anymore choices regarding drugs alcohol and relationships are going to play a larger role in our lives we are in charge of those choices and we can either make positive ones which lead to success or negative ones which lead to consequences each other for making good choices for being clean of bad decisions our members are good role models good friends good students and  the national institute of drug abuse says that by tenth grade thirty percent of teenagers drugs roughly the number of people in the right hand section of the auditorium our challenge to you as you represented c b c members is to prevent the statistic from becoming a reality one way we are going to do that is by arming you with the facts and information we need in order to make better choices today at the assembly we are going to gain more information about drugs we're going to be talking about staying clean in the sense of how drugs can harm mccarthy a pharmacist who will speak to us about how different drugs affect our bodies deputy chief grimes a police man who will talk to you about the consequences of making bad decisions and miss chris mr chris bettinger a man who is here to share his experience with drugs and why i made the decision to get clean at this time we would like to invite miss galley on a to the stage to talk about the effects of drugs on our body hi everybody my name is britney this is becky who are both pharmacists at the v a hospital down in pittsburgh actually where becky is doing a fellowship in addiction so we're here to talk to all of you today about the addiction process and how drugs can seriously impact not only your body but your lifestyle itself so just getting started by a show of hands how many of you have tried a drug before not that many so a drug is just exactly a drug is just a chemical substance that affects your body separates those kind of drugs from drugs that can be addictive so you can just yell out a name of a drug  all right i don't need to spend a lot of time on my first sli  right sell addictive drugs these are just a few of the commonly addictive drugs that can be separated between prescription and non prescription so as you may know some of the non prescription drugs like alcohol marijuana cigarettes those can be the starting step the building blocks and then we may see people progress into some of the prescription drugs so today we're going to talk about the process of addiction so how can these drugs what makes them addictive so drugs tap into your brain's communication system and they disrupt the way yourself send and receive messages so they imitate your brain's natural chemicals and they stimulate the reward circuit of your brain they give you that intense feeling of pleasure so the only way to maintain this intense feeling of pleasure is to take more drugs right so that is then going to lead us to abuse so drug abuse is just the continued use of these substances despite the negative consequences they have and so examples of negative consequences the chief's going to get into that a little bit but consequences that kind of where not only affect your health but your lifestyle and your future where you're going to be down the road so why are kids continuing to abuse drugs if they know of these these negative consequences that they may have and it's because of addiction addiction is a disease addiction is a disease of the brain that can be characterized by compulsive drug seeking despite these harmful consequences so you can possibly see these drugs even though you know that they're going to have these negative consequences you're seeking these to get that sense of pleasure not only to get the high anymore but just to feel just to feel normal so this slide just kind of summarizes the addiction process as a whole so your nestle initial experience with drugs is going to be your choice you choose to do that you may find the very first experience you might find that sense of pleasure you might find that you get away with that your parents don't know your teachers don't know so you choose once again to continue to try that drug at that point the continued use you start to notice small changes in your brain that affect your impulse control they affect your judgment your learning your memory and then you start to see a gradual decline in your self regulation your ability to make those decisions once again so as a as a person continues to abuse drugs the brain adapts to this overwhelming sense of pleasure this all moral whelming stimulus that leads to  a smaller impact or a smaller reward so you need more drugs to give you that same reward and what you'll start to notice is things in your life that normally bring you pleasure spending time with your family spending time with their pets isn't bring you pleasure any more because you're so used to that that high pleasure you've had before so that's just the nature of the addiction and the process of addiction and how it works so this is just a brain imaging study of somebody that has been on drugs and the areas of your brain that are critical to judgment learning thinking putting those all together is what leads a drug abuser to seek out composite trying to find these drugs and despite these negative consequences they may have so you can all shut out but what do you think is the most common age that people start using drugs ok ok good job i hear a lot of a lot of teams i heard a lot of eighteen and you guys are right on the money so according to the national center of addiction and substance abuse nine out of ten people who abuse or become addicted to drugs start using them before they were eighteen years old and in fact those who start using before they're fifteen are seven times more likely to develop a substance use problem versus those who wait until they're at least twenty one years old so the takeaway message is the longer you wait to start drug use which is hopefully never but for those who do  the longer they wait their risk of developing a substance use problem is dramatically decreased but one of the biggest controversies going on right now is that cigarettes which are just battery operated devices that provide nicotine and other chemicals they're marketed as being tools to help people stop smoking traditional cigarettes but the fact is they're just too new we don't have enough data about them to know really the risks and the harmful consequences of using them or not so so far they're not recommended as a tool to stop traditional cigarette use and in fact there is a study that showed students who start using the cigarettes before ninth grade are more likely to transition to treat it traditional cigarettes by the time they hit tenth grade and of course the risks with traditional cigarettes are very well documented lung diseases heart diseases cancer and death marijuana is actually the most common drug used by teens in fact one in seven report using it in the past month this is a mixture of dried leaves stems seeds and flowers of the hemp plant and the problem with marijuana is that so many people believe that it's not addictive when in fact it can be very addictive thirty percent of people who use it do develop a problem use and here again those who use a before the age of eighteen can be seven times more likely to develop a disorder as an adult britney referenced it can make it tired cause some confusion and in fact this is extremely extremely dangerous when it's misuse this is fifty to one hundred times stronger than morphine which means if you if you're not using it as per scribed and abusing it can cause your breathing to stop it can send you into a coma and can cause death as well and of course the recent trend that we're hearing about in the news is that this is getting mixed into the heroin that's sold on the streets so people are accidentally overdosing and dying on that same note to mixing drugs is a recent trend i think a lot of times people don't think of alcohol as a drug but a lot of people are taking alcohol and mixing it with other medications of course that can lead to increased rates of accidental overdose as well and this graph is just showing you that seven out of ten teens who use prescription pain medications non medically combine those with marijuana and alcohol those are the top  three combinations there this is just a graph we want to show you to wrap up it has the different bars represent the different age groups so you have twelve to thirteen fourteen to fifteen and so on and you can see that from ages eighteen to twenty and younger that is when the majority of first drug use speakin so it's just something to keep in mind because i know you're all around the same ages right now so i really just want to drive that point home but your peers and those in your age group now is really when a lot of the drug use arts and then we just want to give you some resources you don't have to write anything down if you don't want to but the first web site there is a government web site there's more information on any drug that you might want to know about if you know somebody that might need  put the suicide prevention hotline up there they don't just help with the suicide problem they talk about a lot of things and get you in touch with people someone close by who might be able to help you and then of course that we included our e mail addresses up there if you last speak to either britney or i you're welcome to do so at this time we would like to welcome deputy chief grimes to talk about consequences of bad choices can hear me good because i don't like to stand behind a podium but so my job is the talking about consequences right and so before i even begin that i just want to ask one question i don't want to answer i just want you to think it's called a rhetorical question as well as just think about this how many of you plan on growing up to become a drug addict i would be willing to bet that the answer that question is none of you and i think what you would find if you talk to anybody who has been or even is currently addicted to drugs and you ask them that question the reasoning answer would be no that was not in my plan that's not part of what i ever thought i would in the simple reason for that is because it is an overpowering addictive drug it takes control of everything that you do and so the important thing for you to know is that that's the result those are the consequences and so if your plans are not to be put in jail or even worse than that possibly die due to an addictive behavior alienate family and friends commit criminal acts against family and friends for forget about all of your plans on what you would like to do and what you would like to become what you would like to achieve as you go through your teenage years and into adulthood because you can just set all of that aside if you decide to even test it and some of the drugs that we're talking about and that we're seeing in law enforcement heroin being one fountain all being another and i think you'll hear this from our next speaker is is extraordinarily addictive it will take over your life in an instant and it's my understanding in my belief that heroin in fact you only need to do it one time and you become addicted and it will take over everything that you do this group this club this seed to be sea organization the whole intent and purpose of that is to put into your mind in the back of your mind what those consequences  that you can make decisions before you even find yourself in one of those situations because i'm here to tell you that every one of you at some point between now and your college years are between now and you maybe early twenty's if you haven't already you will be faced with a scenario where a friend of yours says hey i want to try this it's a really good stuff if you allow yourself to get into that situation without ever having thought about how am i going to respond to that when i'm put in that situation then you're much more likely to give in to that temptation to give in to that peer pressure and say ok i'll try it once with some of these drugs that's all that it takes is once you need to know about that you need to think about that way ahead of time when i find myself in that situation what am i going to say what am i going to do how am i going to respond to that question how am i going to leave that situation one of the things that i did with my sons who are both older as a parent and i would hope you go home today and talk to mom and dad about this was to talk to them about that answer and talk to them about that very scenario if you're in that scenario what can you do if you have a cell phone  what we taught my boys to do was to pick up the phone call home you call home and you say one password whatever you want to set up and for us it was you don't understand so if one of my boys called me and said dad you don't understand then my next question to him was where you at because i'm coming and then it's an easy out for you where you at because i'm coming to get you but you need to have that planned ahead of time because the consequences are far too great each one of you live in a community that gives you tremendous opportunity you have to go to a great school you live in a great place you have awesome teachers you have tremendous opportunity the world is in front of you to be anything you want to be if you just choose to apply yourself if you just choose to be young men and women of character years ago i heard a guy talk about character and he defined it this way characters believe in an absolute system of right versus wrong this is right and that's wrong but it doesn't stop there it's one thing to know right and wrong is a whole other thing to do it so character's belief in an absolute system of right versus wrong combined with the ability to always do what is right always so you're going to hear a little bit more today from a young man who has been through this and i think he's going to echo some of what i've already said about how he got pulled into it and then the impact of that on his life and he's not alone you know the number of heroin overdoses that we see here and peters has increased washington county is is leading the nation per capita on drug overdoses when you look at the numbers per capita there very very high and so that what that tells me and what that should tell you as is that those drugs are out there the fact that they're on the street and they're at your disposal should send you a warning to be prepared for that very scenario and so when you think through this make sure you think through the consequences the other thing that you need to be aware of is from a police perspective a law enforcement perspective one of the things is it's not just about heroin it's not just about marijuana quite often these things start with alcohol and say wow because illegal it is for adults but it's not for you and there's a reason for that but alcohol and beer in many cases is referred to as a gateway drug in the law enforcement world kids who partake in alcohol at a very early age or even cigarettes are much more likely to take that next step the kind of softens the blow you know it's not that bad was it and now one of the trends that we see and we hear in law enforcement because of colorado and some of the other states as well they legalized marijuana there so it can't be that bad right or wrong i can tell you we see it every day the impact of those drugs on people's lives so take the advantage of this organization the c b c put yourself out there when you put yourself out there and you become a member of this basically you're taking that step and you're saying you know what i'm willing to be accountable to someone else i'm willing to step into the limelight and allow people to come alongside of me and help me that's an important process part of this process and that's important because you are demonstrating leadership when you step up into that limelight and then hopefully you'll come alongside some of the other kids and say look why don't we do this and let's work on this together let's talk to each other about how this should work and some of the things we should do some of things we shouldn't do how we want to associate ourselves and what type of name we want to create for ourselves leadership is an extremely important part of your adulthood your teenage years even but your adulthood as you step forward into college and your careers the schools you're going to look for your families looking for seize this moment not every school has this program or this opportunity take it and learn from it and if you find yourself in that situation and you're with friends and somebody says hey let's try this don't be that person that says ok and don't even be that person that says i don't want to do it but you walk away and leave your friend all behind grab that person and say think about this think about the decision and what they're asking us to do and let's get out of here lead them out of that step up and be leaders the young men and women of character and do the right thing thank you so everything that i just heard from from the chief and from your pharmacists directly relates to the decisions that i made in my life i look at you guys and i see myself because i'm only twenty five years old i can remember sitting in the seats i was raised in a very good home i was raised with a very loving family i had a lot of friends show hands how many were my athletes and here yeah that's what i like to see football baseball basketball cheering volleyball ok so at a young age i started to play a lot of sports and i was actually pretty good at him too i traveled all over the country playing baseball coast to coast you know had a lot of fun doing it too so when i got into high school i started to play baseball for my high school team at age fifteen years old i started varsity as a freshman and i was automatically put into this group with the older kids fifteen was also the age that i started to experiment with marijuana drink and party in because it gave me a sense of fitting in with these people i got to fit in with the older kids if i did this i looked so that was that that was the path that i took for myself that was a choice that i made that was a decision that i made for myself so i went through high school and ended up getting a full scholarship to play baseball and call it so i took that off or went to college and played all this time not thinking that my partying you know my my drugs of use in the decisions that i was making was going to eventually affect me as much as they did so when i went to college you know it was more about all right let's go party after we play this game let's go do this after we play this game so that's what i did eventually that overtook my life to the point where i got kicked out of college i lost my scholarship i was in school to be a teacher a special education teacher that was my that was my major in college so when i lost my opportunity to continue that path i came out and i got a job i got a really good job making a lot of money i was twenty years old and i got into basically my family business was working on the pipeline so that's where i went so then i started to experiment a lot more with things the painkillers the opiates the benzodiazepines everything that you saw on that board from your pharmacist i did eventually it overtook me to the point where that was the only thing i thought about and so about three and a half years of that and then the pills became too expensive for me so i started using heroin i started injecting heroin in my arm one time i was a college athlete a full scholarship athlete a straight a student injecting heroin in my arm i remember waking up one day and looking at myself thinking how did you get here this is not what you wanted to be when you grew up that wasn't what i wanted for myself but that's what i became through that addiction my brain totally transformed my brain turned me into somebody that i was not supposed to be two years ago about this month i overdosed on heroin in fact no i was dead luckily i got recess updated they put me in intensive care unit my heart was not pumping half my heart was not pumping blood i was going to die because of decisions that i made now i did not wake up and decide i want to be a drug addict but as you heard previously if you try it one time it can grab you and that's exactly so about two months later still making bad decisions you would think that you know i'm going to die maybe i'll start making better decisions now my brain was so warped that my decision making was gone i had no ability to make good decisions the only thing that i could do is say how can i get my fix today what can i do who can i rob what can i steal to get high today it's terrible lifestyle and i live that so christmas day two years ago i got arrested for the first time if i had been up here your p luckily i never came up here so you don't know me i made a decision to put myself in a rehab facility to try and get myself right didn't work i got arrested six more times in the next three weeks look at all their heads turn and oh my lord yeah today to have ten arrests in my belt i've been arrested ten times i have been in rehab five times i've spent four months in jail because of my drug addiction i woke up in jail one day and i said something is not right this is not who i'm supposed to be and that was the day that i decided to turn my life around it takes a lot to realize that you have a problem it takes a lot to understand that you're not the person that you want to be you're not the person that you envision yourself to be but i became that person and it consumed my life the biggest thing for me was the people that i had i'd made the decision to put myself around i gave in to peer pressure and i guarantee you within the next five years your life you're you're going to be put into situations where you're pressured to do things try this try that you don't know if you have an addicted brain until you've tried that one time it's a choice but you don't have the choice to say whether you're going to get addicted to it or not you don't know that it's better to not even try and find out today my morals and my life is a lot different than what it was a year ago two years ago but it's all a result me making better decisions compared to terrible decisions the relationship i had with my family the relationship i had with my brothers my sisters my friends i destroyed everything i destroyed everything on both sides of the road when i when i really decided i needed to fix something the only people i had were my parents luckily my parents stood by me not many other people that i went from a very popular very well known very privileged person to not having a single friend to call statistically one out of ten people will be addicted to drugs or alcohol one out of ten you can look each way  one out of those ten people are going to be addicted to drugs or alcohol and that's really scary but you know how you can change that statistic don't even make that decision to go there because it's a very dark road it's very painful road and it destroys not only your life and your health but everybody you come into contact with i can tell you that from my experiences when i got the call to come here to speak about my experiences in the program is called cool to be clean but man that's pretty cool because it is really cool to be clean because i learned things every day about myself that i didn't know i didn't know who i was through my addiction i didn't know the decisions i actually i knew but i didn't care i didn't care about anything or anybody except myself i was very selfish and it's only by the grace of god that i'm still even here because i should have died over and over and over again but i didn't don't make that decision for yourself because you will not like the outcome of it because it might be fun at first it was fun at first but it turns into something that you cannot imagine something that will literally destroy everything in your path thank you guys c s goal is to give you the facts so you can make better decisions or you choose to do with this information is up to you one of the things i want to make clear is that future b c is not a popularity contest members are not inducted because of the clothes they wear the number of followers they have or the friends hanging out with students inducted into c d c are those who take ownership of their actions and decisions and embrace a positive past last year we inducted one hundred ninety eight eighth graders and we are so proud of that as a community c b c members are not only role models but they receive awesome benefits from local businesses some of those benefits include buy one get one free smoothies for happiness or shakes after school before five p m monday through friday half off meals on sunday up to fifteen dollars on mcdonald's and a merry also any c to b c students applying for a job at mcdonald's when they turned sixteen years of age will be compensated at a rate of pay of fifty cents per hour greater than a normal  working on getting you even more benefits for this year everyone has the opportunity to b n c to b c it's the choices you make that determine whether you're in or out you can just join because you want to or because your friends  i would like to nominate because she is always respecting others and herself schrenker because of his good decisions and he's a role model i would like to nominate cooper slaven because he is a really good role model guys congratulations to those students who are nominated they're the first seventh graders being nominated into the cool to be clean program and i think something that was that that's really important that you understand and get is the whole notion of you know you heard our speakers talk about peer pressure and the fact of if you're in a situation not if you're going to be in a situation when you're going to be in a situation because it's going to happen you're at an age now where you're going to be in situations where people are going to offer you drugs or alcohol and you're going to be forced to make a decision and so the point of this program one of one of the points of this program is that people who are in it we heard one hundred ninety eighth graders have been inducted in the program and have pledged to be part of the program to say if i'm in that situation i know that i'm going to make a positive right choice and so the more people who that who are inducted in this program the more support you have when you're in a situation such as that that you don't feel like you're the only one that has to say no because you know that the people who you've nominated or the people who have nominated you are feeling the same way that you are feeling and know that this is a choice that i don't want to make in my life that i don't want to sacrifice all of the great things that are happening or could happen in my life over one bad decision and so i just i want to reiterate that we're looking for seventh graders who are going out of their way to make good choices so the folks who just were nominated our nart are now charged with the duty ok i'm going to talk to you for a second those come up on so everybody can see the people who were nominated because i want i want everybody to see you because i'm going to charge you with a challenge that you don't just get inducted into the program earn a bracelet and receive rewards that it is now your duty and your obligation to notice others in your class and in your grade who are making positive choices and decisions ones that you can rely on if ever in a situation that you know that they would have your back they you could support them to support you and so on for you that challenge moving forward that of all the people sitting in this room our goal would be that everybody understands and accepts the challenge of being within this program and to make positive choices in their lives but that doesn't happen unless kids like you are nominating them so when you do get nominated please look for those and they don't necessarily need to be your best friends and i hope that they're not i want you to go out of your way to look for individuals who you know are doing great things here within our school or outside of school and that you bring them on board to say you know what i really believe in this person i believe when push comes to shove or should this person ever be in a compromising situation they're going to make the right choice so i just issued that challenge to  everyone and before we close here we have maybe five minutes does anybody have any questions for any of our speakers or any questions in regards to the program we will provide a lot more information about how to be in the program and what the process is but today was just a launching pad for that yes auburn jamie yes the question was can you nominate more than one person the answer to that is yes you can nominate one courage you nominate more yes very good question once you are nominated there is an official induction so anybody who has been nominated they will be reviewed by the court to be clean board to make sure that this is a good fit and a person who in fact does make positive choice and decisions once that they have gone through that process of getting an adult signature along with the nomination you will be invited to a formal induction which will take place either here in the guy or in the gymnasium and at that time you will be announced and will receive your call to be clean bracelet which signifies that you are an officially inducted member of the program somebody else had a question in the middle another question yes can you be nominated by a teacher the goal of this program is to be it to be nominated by peers should you this is a good question should you want to be included in the program and you haven't been nominated yet you can always tell a teacher or i recommend that you tell a counselor or myself or mr hennigan but tell an adult here in the building like hey it's been two months i really want to be part of this program i haven't been inducted but this is something that really appeals to me and i want to make sure that my positive choices are being recognized and known then you absolutely should tell an adult ok because we don't want to hold people out like if it's the first couple weeks and you haven't been inducted we're going to say wait you know it's only october you have until the rest of the school year to be nominated wait and see if that opportunity does exist before we do find ways for you to be inducted but i would certainly tell one of your teachers yes  r speak a little bit louder oh can you be kicked out of the program and how would you be able to how would you be kicked out yes so if you're inducted into the program and you end up making negative choices in decisions or you're noticed making negative choices and decisions unfortunately your participation within this club will be revoked because again we want to make sure that we have students who are doing the right thing at all times recognizing like the chief said character clear lines between if you're not a member can you nominate someone unfortunately no you need to be an active already inducted member of the corps to be clean program to then nominate another  in the next couple days you're going to learn a lot more information in the home room about the call to be clean program i just challenge everyone to be recognized for the great things that you are doing and thank you for being such a great audience