A recent incident at a Washington Court House elementary school provided a glimpse of what children, schools, and communities are fighting in the battle against the heroin epidemic.
A woman was found unresponsive in a van in the parking lot of the school. Her child, who had just left his kindergarten classroom, was also inside the vehicle. The school’s principal saw that the woman needed medical attention and called for help. EMS workers determined that the mom had overdosed on heroin and treated her with naloxone. After she was revived, she expressed concern that her 1-year-old was at home with his father, who had taken the same drugs.
Fortunately, those children were not physically harmed, but I believe that unless we educate our kids about the dangers of substance abuse, we will have a generation that is emotional traumatized and sees drug use as a normal activity. We must get in front of this problem. Treatment is important, law enforcement is important, but prevention may be the most important thing.
To address the need for more substance-abuse prevention education in schools, last summer, Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger, previous Senate President Keith Faber, and I formed the Ohio Joint Study Committee on Drug Use Prevention Education. We tasked the study committee with looking at the status of substance-abuse prevention education in Ohio schools and recommending how communities could implement consistent, age-appropriate, evidence-based drug messaging, particularly in schools.
Additionally, in February, my office conducted its second statewide meeting on Ohio’s opioid epidemic. This issue of
Criminal Justice Update covers some of the topics of discussion and provides links to materials. To the crowd of about 1,300 gathered at the Fellowship Baptist Church in Columbus for “Ideas in Motion — Fighting Ohio’s Drug Epidemic,” Lori Criss, associate director of the Ohio Council of Behavioral Health and Family Services Providers, talked about her work on the study committee and the report: “We ended up with a product that shows that it’s more than just talking to kids about alcohol and drug use, it’s about giving them the social and emotional skills they need to avoid substance use long-term. It’s not a one and done kind of experience for any child in the home, in the school, or in the community. It’s something that has to take place throughout their development, K-12.”
I hope
our report will serve as a roadmap to prevention services for schools and communities throughout Ohio.
Very respectfully yours,
Mike DeWine
Ohio Attorney General