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Heroin a problem in Valley schools, police official says
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Ann Whitmire, left, Mariana Stankiewicz and Eileen Nieves are among the parents who attended a meeting about drug use and prevention Thursday night at Mesquite Junior High School in Gilbert.
Lisa Olson, Tribune
Parents leaving Gilbert’s annual drug prevention seminar Thursday night felt prepared to begin a conversation with their kids about drugs.
“I think I became complacent thinking I know my kids,” said Kay Warfield, a parent of children, ages 7, 10 and 13.
Warfield was among a crowd of about 250 people — most of them concerned parents and residents — who attended the two-hour seminar at Gilbert Unified School District’s Mesquite Junior High. School officials said they hold the annual meeting to raise awareness to combat the problem.
“This problem cannot be resolved by schools alone,” said Superintendent Brad Barrett. “It cannot be resolved by parents alone. We need each other.”
The seminar began with a presentation by Chris Zamora, who works in the narcotics division of the Gilbert Police Department, followed by a presentation by Sarah Christensen from notMYkid.org.
Zamora told parents a brief history of various street drugs, explaining what they look like, the effects, the paraphernalia and different names.
“Heroin is something we’re seeing like crazy,” Zamora said. “A lot of the cases we’re working in our unit are (related to) heroin.”
The type of heroin typically found in the East Valley is black tar heroin, which users sometimes place on tinfoil, heat it and produce fumes that can be inhaled to get high. On the street, it’s called “chasing the dragon.”
“If you see discarded pieces of tinfoil, open it up and see what it looks like inside,” Zamora said. If there are black streaks or lines, it was probably used for heroin.
The audience was surprised when Christensen showed several photos of teens smoking marijuana with pipes, bongs or other paraphernalia. She told them she got all the pictures from the social networking site, MySpace.com.
Christensen also showed various paraphernalia and the ways teens stash them: pipes made to look like a high-lighter pen or lipstick tube, plus hollowed-out candles, books and VHS tapes where drugs or tools for getting high can be stored.
Christensen advised parents to create a family drug prevention plan.
Parents should be educated, communicate with their children, be consistent, and know their children’s friends and their friends’ parents, she said.
Some other prevention tools, she said, are home breath analyzers and drug test kits.
Larry and DeAnn Kettenring said when they got home they planned to check their medicine cabinets and start discussing drugs with their elementary school-age children.
“I didn’t think I had to worry about it yet,” DeAnn Kettenring said.
Online resources for parents:
www.notMYkid.org
www.Project7thGrade.org
www.drugfree.org
www.samhsa.gov
www.theantidrug.com
www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov
www.firstcheckfamily.com
Online resources for kids:
www.ClearChoices.org
www.notMYkid.org
www.thecoolspot.gov
www.teens.drugabuse.gov
www.freevibe.com
www.drugfree.org/Teen
www.goaskalice.columbia.edu
www.thesite.org
www.checkyourself.com
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