Heroin and other opioid addiction affects 200,000 Ohioans and kills more than three of them a day. Yet Ohio public schools sorely lack age-appropriate information in their health curricula to help prevent addiction to prescription painkillers and heroin.
Despite considerable progress in changing attitudes, many students still believe that highly addictive prescription painkillers such as Vicodin, Percocet, and Oxycontin are safe for recreational use. Surveys from treatment providers in Ohio show that 80 percent of people who are addicted to heroin started with prescription pain medication.
Under a new state law, educational efforts on opioid addiction are no longer optional in public schools — nor should they be. The General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a bill, signed into law in late 2014, that requires local school districts to instruct their students on the dangers of prescription opioid abuse.
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The bill was one of several proposals that state Rep. Robert Sprague (R., Findlay) has pushed through the legislature to fight opioid addiction. Schools can educate students in many ways, but nothing is more effective than letting them hear the stories of people who have been directly affected by this disease and epidemic, including addicts in recovery and treatment providers.
Schools in northwest Ohio should note the efforts of Lucas County Sheriff John Tharp and a four-person recovery team, consisting of recovering addicts who have been helped by the sheriff’s Drug Abuse Response Team. The DART unit, which steers low-level drug offenders into treatment, has become a national model for how law enforcement can fight addiction in new ways.
DART officers and recovery team members Matt Bell, Brett Hansen, Jett Hill, and Basil Arcuri are talking to local students about addiction, including a session with the freshman class of Bowsher High School last week. They discuss their journey to addiction and take questions from students. Mr. Bell, 29, a star high school and college athlete, became addicted to heroin after he got hooked on painkillers after a sports injury.
Sheriff Tharp said his office will record some of these sessions and make the DVDs available to schools throughout Lucas County. Schools and districts could customize the DVDs by including a message from the local superintendent, principal, or others. Sheriff Tharp and the recovery team also plan to work with college athletic departments, whose injured athletes are often prescribed painkillers.
Last year, Gov. John Kasich’s Opiate Action Team sent recommendations to the Ohio Department of Education on how to teach about opioid abuse and its connection to heroin. The team made separate recommendations for kindergarten through third grade, fourth and fifth grade, sixth through eighth grade, and ninth through 12th grade.
Schools will meet the law’s requirements in different ways. Educational efforts on opioid abuse will vary from district to district, and from school to school. All districts and schools, however, need to take the new law seriously.
Recovering addicts who talk to students need to be far enough along in their recovery that the stress and rigors of talking to people about it won’t knock them off course. For them, helping others will also strengthen them. Stopping addiction through education will prevent this crisis from continuing for generations.
The educational efforts made by DART officers and the new recovery team provide another reason that Lucas County has become a national leader in the fight against opioid and heroin addiction. Local schools should take advantage of the many resources available here, as they try to educate their students about the dangers of addiction and meet the requirements of the new law.
First Published February 28, 2016, 5:00 a.m.
