"The early onset of prescription drug abuse we see as early as early middle school, if not as early as later elementary school." -Jennifer Vitkus, Regional Underage Drinking and Drug Use Prevention Coalition
Opiod, drug and alcohol abuses are easily the thing that the WGY Newsroom gets the most email about.
Addictions cause so much harm to us. Harm to us as individuals, harm to our families, harm to our communities, harm to our security. We can calculate the costs of losing a job, losing a home, emergency visits and incarceration, but we can never begin to calculate all of the lost contributions that could have been made by individuals had they never become addicted in the first place.
In this podcast we are focusing on underage drinking and drug abuse prevention. Our guests are Chief Kerry Thomspon and Jennifer Vitkus, speaking for the Regional Underage Drinking and Drug Use Prevention Coalition. They have some shocking facts about how the numbers are trending for the youngest members of our community, and the unfortunate decrease in the number of SADD chapters in our area.
Photos by Getty