CHAPTER 1
OUR STORY
For those of you that are having trouble with your teenagers, we need to get something straight right off the bat. There is a mysterious phenomenon that takes place when families start experiencing behavioral problems with their teens. The parents automatically assume that they are the only ones this is happening to. On the flipside, there are a lot of families that just don't believe this could ever happen to them. I know that's what we thought. Nothing could be further from the truth. Millions of families are going through the same thing and many of them have it much worse than you or I do. I know that is hard for you to hear right now, but it's true.
As time goes on, you will come across people from all walks of life that are much worse off than you or me but up until now, we've all been totally absorbed in our own situation, that we haven't been able to look around to see how many of our own close neighbors or family are going through the same things.
I promise you that before your crisis settles down, you will say a multitude of times:
Just when you think you have it bad, someone like this comes along. I guess we can get through this after all.
I'll tell our story and then move forward to help you. I know you want to get right to the meat of the matter, the solutions and answers. Well, you can't find the answers until you're sure of what the right questions are. Make sense?
Be patient. There is a method to my madness.
Let me paint the picture for you. Let's say your teen is drinking very heavily at an early age, say thirteen or fourteen years old. It doesn't happen you say? Guess again. If your teen is becoming involved with drugs or alcohol, you will probably start seeing signs of it right about the end of seventh grade. Sound impossible? Sorry, but it's not only possible, but very likely that your teen will be exposed to alcohol at that age. The really scary thing is; if they are drinking or doing drugs, you may be shocked to find out they've been doing it right under your nose for some time. I'll get into the signals to look for later on. I wish I didn't know any of this. Life was much better before I did.
First off, not all teens are bad. In fact, the great majority of them are good kids and live a clean life. Teens today aren't a whole lot different than we were. They may be defiant, angry, confused, arrogant, disrespectful, or all of the above. My God, did I just describe the 60's? This is where you can laugh—seventies, eighties, or fifties for that matter.
There is, however, one major difference between then and now. Our kids are faced with a heck of a lot more exposure to alcohol, drugs, and gangs than we ever were. To tell you the truth, I would NOT want to be a teenager today. When I was a teenager in the late sixties, sure drugs were around. We had grass, alcohol, acid, LSD, cocaine, and many more. But, you kind of had to know where to go find them. When you did smoke grass, it wasn't like it is today. I mean, it was grass, that's all. Nowadays, they are cultivating it in different strengths. I mean they are actually color coding it by strength. All a kid has to do now is stand around by his locker and someone will come to him. It's amazing!
I mentioned earlier to imagine your teen drinking heavily at the age of thirteen or fourteen. In case you have any doubts that they do it, look at the charts below. These are the results of a study performed by the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a division of the Center for Disease Control (CDC). This is only one of the questions they asked nationwide. They asked teens if they have consumed alcohol before the age of thirteen other than just a few sips. The results are listed every two years from 1991 through 2011. As you can see, there's a gradual decrease. Interestingly, it is pretty evenly split between males and females. The percentages can be deceiving. There are still a lot of young people out there doing it.
Way back then, there was weed, alcohol, speed, LSD, heroin, and acid. This is some nasty stuff indeed. Today, when your teen buys that bag of weed, the odds are it will be laced with something with a little more kick to it such as PCP or Heroin. The scum that's out there selling it is determined to get your child hooked as fast as possible regardless of the risk to your child. Their attitude is simple. If he dies, oh well, I'll just find another one to sell to. While we're at it, let's not forget our new friends, Ecstasy and Crystal Meth. They target girls with Ecstasy because it gets them to lower their inhibitions. It makes it easier for the boys to get what they want.
The National Institute for Drug Abuse monitored marijuana use among teenagers and found the following.
Statistics and Trends
Monitoring the Future Study: Trends in Prevalence of Marijuana/Hashish for 8th-Graders, 10th-Graders, and 12th-Graders; 2012 (in percent)
As you can see, 8th graders are slowly increasing, but look at the 10th and 12th graders. According to this graph, the older they get, the more they use it. But the fact remains, Marijuana is penetrating the 8th grade age bracket more and more. Starting with alcohol and marijuana, you can see the progression. 38% of teens interviewed have had alcohol before they turned 13. Then in the nineties, we see that 8th graders have started using marijuana at an increasing rate. Then it declined until about 2007 when it started to increase again.
Most begin with alcohol. Make no mistake about it. Alcohol is not a drug. It is THE drug. The younger the child, the faster they get addicted to alcohol. So watch out! And please don't utter that ridiculous cliché "at least they're not doing drugs." Yes they are!! Alcohol is the biggest gateway drug out there. So, what comes next you ask? Usually marijuana. When alcohol just isn't enough, rest assured that one of their good friends will turn them on to weed or something else.
Most of this is pretty easy to get. Far too easy but it is what it is. There are dealers for everything now. Much of it is controlled by gangs or the mob. So just getting mixed up with a dealer is bad news. Adults are adults. They are legally old enough to make their own decisions and mistakes. There's not much you or I can do about that. To drug dealers, the adults are just a source of income. Adults have more money to spend. But children have ways to get the money too. Dealers selling to adults are bad enough and should be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law. But dealers who sell to kids are the worst. If you find one, notify the police. Look at it this way. When they sell this junk to your child, they can get addicted or even die. The dealer couldn't care less how it hurts them or you.
So why then should you feel bad about turning them in?
Dealers that sell to children are the worst and the punishment laws for them should be five times as tough as those that sell to adults. Our children can go just about anywhere and buy alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, crack, prescription medicine, and many more. They have found all sorts of things to get high on such as cold medicine, glue, and who knows what else. That's bad enough. We don't need dealers standing on the corner just waiting for them. These are cold-hearted, vicious people who don't care who they hurt. They are interested in one thing and one thing only—MONEY!
Crystal Meth dealers are simply nothing more than cold-blooded murderers. They make it in home-made labs usually out in the country. They do it there because in the farm country, liquid methane, a main ingredient, is readily available. They also have the entire countryside to throw away the residue that's left over. When mixed with things like ammonia, it becomes very explosive and extremely toxic. This stuff is so bad that when the authorities go into these labs, they have to wear protective suits. This garbage can be absorbed through the skin. It can also be absorbed simply by breathing the air in the room. Meth is extremely addictive and even just one use CAN addict you. ONE USE!!! Maybe not always, but it can. Once it's in your system, it acts like a fast moving cancer literally eating you alive from the inside out.
Why would someone try this you ask?
Well, just a couple of reasons are:
* It enhances rapid weight loss.
* It's a tremendous high—a little too tremendous. You don't go to sleep for days or even weeks.
Hard to believe isn't it?
People that deal this drug should be prosecuted and severely punished. Ok, so I'm a mean old man. But while you're calling me cruel and insensitive, remember this: The drug dealer sells this junk to YOUR child. He doesn't care what happens as long as he gets them hooked. And believe me he or she couldn't care less how it hurts you.
Not all children start out in the big leagues such as Meth or Heroin. Ergo the name "gateway drug." After that, it could lead to cocaine, then heroin, then Meth, and so on. One of the things my wife and I learned was that when teens drink to the point of addiction, it is usually accompanied by something else like depression. So, if you have a depressed teen and they drink alcohol, which is a depressant, what chance do they have? While they may be trying to self-medicate, they are actually compounding the problem.
I'd like you to just close your eyes for a few moments and think. You won't have to try very hard to remember at least some of the neighborhood gossip about friends and neighbors that have a teen that's been arrested for drinking, smoking weed, or worse. You may also remember that good friend whose teen is in drug rehab and you were shocked because he or she was so young and was such a nice kid. How about the fourteen year old girl at school that just had a baby. You've known her parents for years. They are good people. They go to church every Sunday. They work hard to give their children every opportunity they never had. What went wrong? We'll get to that later. Just let your mind wander up and down your street.
Think about the children you coached in little league that you're hearing things about.
He was so cute on the field wasn't he?
Think about the children on your block that you've seen walking around smoking cigarettes and they couldn't care less who sees them.
How do they get them you ask?
Cigarettes are so easy to get it's scary. Remember how often you see the police parked in front of the house at the end of the block? Their fifteen year old daughter punched her mother? My God, what is this world coming to? Well, it happens, and far too often.
Last, but not least. You could have a neighbor like mine. Yes, just five houses away, the police and their dogs found over thirty marijuana plants in the guy's basement. Just five houses away.
Get the picture yet?
Now I ask you to think about what your first thought is when you remember these situations. I'm sure you have had one or more of these thoughts:
"That girl's parents are my age and they're going to get stuck raising that baby, you watch."
"God, when that kid gets out of rehab, he'll just go back to doing drugs like before."
"If that were my daughter and she ever hit my wife, she'd never do it again, I guarantee that."
Lastly, let's not forget the infamous: "If I ever catch my kid smoking, I'll make him eat those cigarettes."
Yea right!
Well, now that we've established that we all hear and say the same things, what next? First you have to accept that these things are not taken from some psychiatrist's book. They are real symptoms and real reactions to them. Just look around and you'll see it's true.
One of the most frightening and eye-opening things my wife and I learned is we are NOT the exception—we are the norm. When I stood back and thought about all the things I mentioned earlier, I was stunned to find this fact to be horribly true. When you attend meetings with organizations such as Families Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narconon, and many others, the first thing you will learn is that this is NOT just happening to your family. There is actually some comfort in knowing that. So if you take nothing else away from reading this book, take that fact with you.
My wife and I have two children—for privacy sake, let's call them John and Ashley. Those are two popular names. We'll call my wife Kathy and you can call me Calvin.
It all started when John was beginning high school and Ashley was in seventh grade. We had been noticing John acting strangely for a few months. His temper was getting very nasty. He seemed withdrawn and depressed and growing more distant every day. He became violent whenever he was confronted or caught doing something wrong. We thought he was doing fine in high school.
After all, he was on the freshman football team, meeting girls, and hanging out with a lot of new friends. Little did we know that these were the very things that were putting so much pressure on him that he just couldn't deal with it.
You see, our son is an average student and so were my wife and I. We really didn't think much about it until we started seeing reports of missing assignments—a lot of them. When we'd ask him about it, he would just clam up and get nasty about even being asked. Later, he would always apologize, but we could see he was hurting inside. There was something eating at him and we had no clue what it was. As time went on, what we found was that John was simply over his head trying to keep up with school and play football. This is no small commitment. Practice every day plus Saturdays were game days. By the time he came home from practice every day, he was exhausted and couldn't keep his mind on his schoolwork. Our first thought was just as I'm sure yours is. If your grades suffer, no football. This proved to be a tougher call than we imagined. Football was good for him in several ways. It kept him in good physical shape. He learned discipline. It was the one sport he finally found that he really liked to play. But there was more. There was something else that we felt but could not put a finger on. All we knew was that our son was heading downhill and fast.
The last straw came when he started doing what he called snapping. In other words, when he had enough, he had enough. Now we knew we had to do something. This simply wasn't like him. He was punching holes in the walls, throwing things, swearing, and just expressing a large amount of anger. I decided it was time to force the issue out in the open. We could no longer bear to see him suffer like this.
It turns out my son was head over heels in love with a girl. Don't get me wrong, she was not the entire problem by any means. But she was a huge factor in all of this. She had him wrapped completely around her finger. When she said jump, he said how high. So now, he is juggling school, football, and a girl. A girl, by the way, who was a major pothead.
Well, he started smoking pot. I don't blame the girl for that because it was his choice. What really bothered me was that she introduced it to my daughter who was younger. Being brother and sister, naturally, they covered for each other.
One night, they were at some club for young teens when it finally happened. We were moving furniture and found the now infamous bag of weed. It was under a dresser along with a homemade aluminum foil pipe. We got in the car and went to that club and picked them up. The ride home was intense to say the least. I remember my son saying to me "I knew this day would come Dad." He was always the type of kid that would confess when he did something wrong. My daughter, on the other hand, would never admit anything no matter how much physical proof we had.
After two weeks of being grounded, my son decided to quit. But the worst was just getting started with my daughter. The days ahead were about to get very dark for a very long time. We found quickly just how many kids smoke weed or do other things.
Shortly after that incident, Ashley's behavior began to change dramatically. She seemed out of it half the time and viciously defiant the rest of the time. We looked harder around the house for clues. In her closet, we found an empty fifth Vodka bottle. Ashley was drinking a lot. When we confronted her, she denied it and of course said it belonged to someone else.
