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Two University of Miami medical students examine the track marks of a patient at the IDEA Exchange, which offers free wound care and HIV screenings.
Zachary Didier, a seventeen-year-old from Rocklin, California, thought that he had bought Percocet—a medication used to manage pain—from a dealer on Snapchat. Instead, the counterfeit pill was laced with fentanyl. Didier died in December 2020.
Like adults, teenagers have experienced an increase in drug use during the coronavirus pandemic. The rate of 911 calls in the United States for people under twenty years old dealing with drug-related issues increased by 43 percent in 2020. More than 80 percent of calls included intentional or unintentional opioid use.
“If one child is saved from it, isn’t it worth the cost and the time involved?”
Recognizing this problem, the Office of National Drug Policy announced in late September that it would distribute more than $13 million to 106 different Drug-Free Communities (DFC) Support Programs across the United States.
Each of these programs develops its own strategies to help youth, who are evaluated to see if they qualify for funding. About 65 percent of DFC support programs increase the availability of naloxone (an overdose reversing drug) to their communities, according to data from August 2020.
“The way that the drug-free community program is developed, if you look at the legislation language, it’s not abstinence only,” says Anthony Salandy, the interim managing director of programs at National Harm Reduction Coalition. “There needs to be a lot of education around harm reduction, what harm reduction is.”
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A naloxone kit, used to reverse an overdose.
One of the three California-based grantees was the Coalition for Auburn and Lincoln Youth (CALY), which serves youth and their families in Lincoln and Auburn, communities in the Sacramento metropolitan area.
“We’re hearing from parents that are like, ‘Gosh, I really want to know how to support my child,’ ” says Shelley Rogers, program director for CALY. “One of the things that we did recently was host a town hall to provide harm reduction resources and supplies.”
“We just had some tragic losses, so we’re really trying to educate youth and parents that one pill can kill,” Rogers adds.
Harm reduction initiatives can vary, but general measures include distributing naloxone throughout communities and providing drug-testing sites and kits. An April 2019 study also found that teenagers prefer harm reduction messaging over abstinence-only or zero-tolerance messaging, as it better represents their lived experiences.
Ever since her children were young, Tracey Helton Mitchell, an activist and recovering addict based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has spoken to them about the realities of overdoses and the importance of naloxone.
“Parents should really be having conversations about overdoses,” Mitchell tells The Progressive. “We as parents have to be proactive in providing the best tools we can to keep our children safe, and that [involves] acknowledging the fact that kids do use drugs.”
Mitchell also knows parents who have lost children to opioid overdoses. To prevent these losses, she thinks training on how to use naloxone should be as normalized as that for CPR.
“If one child is saved from it, isn’t it worth the cost and the time involved?” Mitchell says.
Roseann Capanna-Hodge, a psychologist who focuses on children’s mental health, says parents need to have frequent, honest conversations with their teenagers about the potential consequences of misusing substances.
“Even though talking to teens who are actively using isn’t easy and certainly a bit scary for a parent, coming at it from a place of love and wanting to help their teen develop healthy habits is important,” Capanna-Hodge wrote in an email. “Parents should continue to open the door to future conversations, as well as role model healthy ways to manage stress, and getting a teen help for their underlying struggles is important.”
Community-based programs like CALY offer support to parents, and many of these programs have had to adapt to remote or hybrid environments during the pandemic. Rogers notes that some students expressed that remote learning affected their mental wellbeing.
“It’s been easier for some people to attend virtually from home, so we had great attendance prior to the pandemic, but we’ve had really phenomenal attendance at our meetings,” she says. “The isolation really compounded issues where kids were already struggling, and that’s one of the things we’re finding.”
Even with community outreach, there are limitations to harm reduction that require the federal government to take action. This includes things like the current barriers to offering syringe exchange services to people who inject drugs. HIV can be transmitted through shared needles, and research suggests that younger drug users are more likely to contract HIV than drug users over the age of thirty.
“The federal government needs to lift this long-standing ban that they’ve had on using federal dollars to buy syringes so harm reduction providers can provide syringes to their communities,” says Maritza Perez, the director of the office of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance.
Salandy agrees that people who inject drugs should be treated with dignity and respect and supports alternatives to arresting someone who was misusing substances. “Instead of locking someone up, maybe call a community-based organization that practices harm reduction services,” Salandy says.
Oregon decriminalized all drugs in a statewide ballot measure in November 2020, which has been viewed as a step toward seeing substance misuse as a public health issue instead of as a crime. This measure also applies to teenagers who are misusing substances.
While a nationwide step to decriminalize all drugs does not seem to be in the immediate future, families and community-based organizations are working together to support teenagers.
“We’re never going to be a drug-free country,” Perez says. “Instead, we should ensure that we can save lives to the degree that we can.”