Good Drugs or Bad Drugs?

When your kid is being wheeled out of the operating room after having his appendix surgically removed and the medical personnel are getting ready to administer morphine to ease his pain, are you going to say, "Drugs are bad. Don't do drugs."?

When your kid gets married and the guests raise their glasses of champagne to toast the bride and groom, are you going to say, "Drugs are bad. Don't do drugs."?

As you gulp down a cup of coffee to kick start a rough morning or sip a martini to help you relax at the end of a tough day, are you going to look your kid in the eye and say, "Drugs are bad. Don't do drugs.”?

This is a common theme in our society today.

We are groomed from very early years to the idea that there are good drugs and bad drugs.

This line of thinking in many cases leads to a major misunderstanding of what drugs are.

So as you look over you life and wonder whether or not your kids...

Clueless About Drugs and Emotion

Earlier we had done a quiz on "What emotion does drug use begin with?"

At that time 62% had answered incorrectly and 38% answered correctly - Boredom.

The follow-up quiz to this was "What is the cause of Boredom".

We had a lot of great answers on this quiz and I wanted to share the results with you:
75% answered incorrectly.
25% answered correctly with "Lack of Goals, No Goals, no worthwhile goals".

Emotion plays a big role in drug use and most kids start using drugs because they are bored.

And when you trace this back you find that the reason they are bored is because they have not defined any goals for themselves.

In our new film Drugs and Emotions, Mr. Wiggins explores the various emotions that we experience in life and educates kids on what they are and how to spot them.

This new film also explores what goals are and how to achieve them.

As you can see from the survey results above, most of our kids will be clueless about emotions and what causes boredom.

Knowing this it is easy to see that this information is vital for all kids to have.

It has been discovered that without goals kids have no direction and with no direction kids fall prey to those who would push drugs on them for lack of nothing better to do.

In the many interviews I have personally conducted with former drug dealers and users, it was a common theme that they had nothing else better to do at the time and decided to have some fun with their friends etc.

We are embarking upon the final production phase of our new film "Drugs and Emotions".

We need your help now more than ever.

Who's Job is it Anyway?

When we think about family and we think about our home and who keeps it all together, many of us can agree that mothers are usually the ones to do that.

Whether there is a problem within the marriage or not, when kids are involved, most times mom is the one they come running to.

This seems to hold true when it comes to drug abuse.

A study from Penn State University revealed that teenagers have a preference of which parent they prefer to talk to about the subject of drugs:
70% of teens are more at ease when talking with their moms.
12% of the teens in the survey favored talking with their fathers.
7.4% preferred talking with their grandparents.
7.4% favored talking with siblings.
3% preferred talking with other extended family members.

Whether it is the mom or the dad that kids turn to, there is one thing that parents must be certain about; what to say when your kids do ask you about drugs.

While sometimes it may be difficult for parents, I have found that honesty in communication with your kids about drugs and even your experiences with them will go a long way to gaining your kids trust in what you say.

However, for many parents it just seems like a tough thing to confront.

Most of the parents I have spoken to confessed to me that they would not know or did not know what to say about drugs to their kids.

Many parents I have spoken with would never believe their kids would even do drugs.

You could say they were in "denial" about their kids drug use.

In fact, I even documented this in the feature called "Why Parents Are The Last to Know" included with the Marijuana The Myth DVD.

With school back in full bloom it is inevitable that your kids and family members are going to be faced with issues regarding drugs.

It is important that you and your family get fully educated on the subject of drugs in order for you to handle the situations.

Iraq is Not The Only War Costing America Billions

What problem costs the American economy more than $100 billion every year?

What problem causes employers to incur a 300 percent increase in medical costs and benefits?

What problem is being addressed by large companies but neglected by small businesses?

The answer is substance abuse in the workplace, including alcohol abuse as well as illicit drug use.

And it's a bottom line issue that is only getting worse for our nation's small business owners.

Research shows that substance abusers are:

5 times more likely to file a workers' compensation claim.
2.5 times more likely to have lengthy absences from work.
3 times more likely to be late for work.
Likely to use 2.5 times more medical benefits, and
One-third less productive.

According to the Labor Department, five million of the country's estimated nine million employed substance abusers work for small companies.

This may well be a conservative estimate, as those workers most at risk for substance abuse are more likely to be employed by small, rather than large, firms.

For example, small companies hire a greater percentage of young personnel than do large businesses, and surveys show that in general, marijuana and cocaine abuse are more prevalent in this age group.

And the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) estimates that ...

Are We Making A Difference?

This is our 100th briefing and I decided that we should do a quick check to see if this good work we are all doing is making any difference.

So I looked up some recent research that means something.

While we gather successes from schools week in and week out, all the staff here at Friends of Narconon have a keen focus on one major statistic.

That is whether or not the NATIONAL drug use is dropping.

In order for you to really understand what this means it is a good idea to understand the universe we are working in.

In the USA the population just went past 301,139,947.

Of that there is just over 50 Million school kids.

So our current target audience is 50 Million students spread out across more than 100,000 schools (public and private).

These are very LARGE numbers indeed.

So when we are talking NATIONAL drop in drug use, this is no small task.

So, would you like to know how things are going on the national drug scene?

Would you be interested in knowing if all your support is making a difference?

(This briefing is longer than usual, but trust me, you'll want to know this data!)

Marketing Drugs to The Masses

In a previous article we talked about a natural hallucinogenic drug that was easily available over the internet.

These types of websites actually are called "No Prescription Websites" (NPWs) which offer to sell controlled substances without a valid prescription.

NPWs were first recognized by the U.S. Justice Department in 1999, indicating that such sites had been operating at least through the late 1990s.

NPWs enable dealers and users to complete transactions without direct contact.

While many NPWs accept credit cards, others only accept cash thereby further reducing any paper trail.

Many NPWs are hosted in countries in which specific categories of controlled substances are locally legal (e.g. prescription opioids in Mexico), but because of the global nature of the internet, NPWs are able to do (mostly illegal) business with customers around the globe.

In addition to prescription opioids, stimulants, and sedatives, steroids are often widely distributed.

To date, no websites have been found offering directly to sell illegal drugs like heroin, illegal amphetamine or methamphetamine derivatives, or cocaine, however the police have uncovered several instances of dealers/drug rings using Craigslist personal ads to solicit drug business using code words and phrases.

All other categories of drugs are readily available online.

As you can see our kids have more access to ...