I’m pleased to introduce Jeff Wolfsberg, who is a Drug Education Specialist, Recovery Coach, and author.
His book, Message in a Bottle, has the answers to many of the questions parents of teens are asking, such as “If I discover my child is using drugs, what do I do?” or How do I support and encourage my child not to use alcohol and other drugs?”
I sat down with Jeff to ask him about his work and the current teen alcohol and drug trends.
Why did you decide to become a drug education specialist? What have been your biggest challenges, and what have you enjoyed most about the job?
The title “Drug Education Specialist” is one I created. I can wear many hats depending on what I’m doing. I see the Drug Education Specialist role as not just going into the classroom to conduct seminars and host conversations with students, but also working with the whole system.
This is not something you can become unless you earn the students’ endorsement. Either you have that “thing”, and I can recognize it in somebody else when they are working with teens immediately, or you don’t. There is an intrinsic quality to it that is already there.
My favorite part is always the students. Any time that I’m physically in front of students, having conversations, whether they are very informal, like after class, when they come up to me and say, “Hey, something you said during class really kind of triggered me.”
When I do the big assemblies, I call it psychoedutainment, which is a word I made up.
You have to entertain. You have to inform. You have to inspire.
It’s difficult to do all three, which is why very few people can make a living at it.
People forget that engagement is really the whole purpose of doing any drug education. It’s really about creating a youth-friendly environment, a youth-friendly space.
You are trying to create, to the best of your ability, a moment in the day where we can have a thoughtful, authentic, connected conversation about the role substances and mental health are playing in their lives.
The kids are always extremely appreciative when you pull it off because they don’t feel that you are talking down to them.
They don’t feel like, “Here we go again.”
When I go to a new school you can have a lot of fun with their resistance, believe it or not. I walk in, sit down, do a little chit chat, and make them laugh. There is a somewhat formulaic approach to it.
Depending on the situation, I start off with, “Tell me everything you hate about drug education. Tell me everything you hate about this topic.
It gives them a forum to complain.
“It’s the same old stuff we’ve talked about since sixth grade. It’s Don’t, Don’t, Don’t.”
I tell them, “I’m just going to avoid all that. Does that sound good to you guys? Hold me accountable if you think I’m doing any of these things wrong. Let me know.
I’m not here to preach or moralize. I’m here because I’m really interested in where you are struggling. I’m interested in what is going on in your life. I wonder if a conversation about this stuff would be somewhat helpful.”
What are the three top things that parents should know with regard to teen substance use?
First, I work primarily with private, independent schools, so these are typically families with financial means, who are well educated, and who do well.
The way I phrase it in a meeting is, “We used to prepare our children for the road; now we prepare the road for our children.”
When you remove obstacles, you remove opportunities for growth. You try to spare them pain and suffering. You are really sparing them the necessary scuffs and scrabbles of life that really are the best lessons.
Then they get out into the real world, and the real world has no interest in treating them with entitlement.
The real world is rough. It’s unforgiving. It can be a harsh place. So many kids come out, and they are not prepared.
I try to let parents know that it is okay for their children to fail. For different audiences, that resonates more than with the private school people. For them, failure becomes an extension of who they are as a parent. “If my kid screws up, then I’ve screwed up,” and they can’t separate the two.
I took a great education program called Landmark Education. They used the word collapsing. When you collapse two things that aren’t necessarily related, you have a lot of problems.
The child’s failure collapses with any identity that the parent may have. My child’s failure is my failure. I try to help parent groups understand that itis okay to let their kids fail.
It’s not about you. And if it is, then you’ll figure it out. It’s not usually.
The second thing is that we know a lot more today about addiction and substance abuse. We have indicators that help us determine who is vulnerable and who is not. We’ve all heard the ones about genetics, family history, and low self-esteem.
Drinking and drug use is an equal opportunity type of thing. Regardless of how successful, bright, handsome, pretty, or socially savvy your child is, it doesn’t mean that they are immune to alcohol and other drug use and the potential problems associated with it.
Usually, the more intelligent the teenager, the more likely they are going to be to use. Intelligence actually becomes a risk factor for some students. They think they can outthink it, outthink everybody else, and it won’t happen to them.
I try to let parents know their perfect little boy has the potential to use it because he is still a human being. He still has neurology that is set by drug use that produces pleasure.
He is also still a social being, so he has the same needs regardless of intelligence: to be accepted, to be welcomed by a peer group, to do things that are really stupid but that give him some kind of reward with peers. Those are all factors that matter.
Make room for the idea that your child can be using. I think that is why my middle school work resonates so much with parents: 7th- and 8th-grade parents are right on the cusp of having to realign their image of their child.
Sometimes, the parents of an 8th-grade girl or 8th-grade boy hold on to that image of their baby a little too long into high school, and it can be hurtful. It can be dangerous not to make room for the social climate that has changed dramatically.
There’s a social world out there. It’s complicated. Kids are susceptible to it, no matter what they do at school or how nice they are.
Third, Parents underestimate the importance of self-care. It’s true for the basic average family that is not struggling with any problems at this point. Parental self-care is a priority.
Nurturing their relationship with their partner, that is essential. They are nurturing a relationship with themselves.
Taking care of yourself and taking care of your relationship with your partner, those two things breed the type of love that you need to be a good parent.
There are really two times of the day that you need to say, I love you to everybody in the family, and that is at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day.
Bookend your days with I love you.
When you wake up in the morning, there is an opportunity to say I love you, and there is always an opportunity to say I love you when the day is over. Not nurturing your relationship with your partner is easy to do when you are in the throes of family life.
One of my favorite books is The 5 Love Languages, by Gary Chapman. The premise of the book is that everyone has a way in which they interpret being loved, and the five love languages are Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Affection, Quality Time, and Gifts.
We probably have a little bit of all of them, but there are one or two that are primary. Kids have them as well. Parents and partners have them, and it is essential that people know their children’s and partners’ love languages so they can always be in a state of love or more easily enter a state of lovingness when they know their own love language.
What are the current drug trends that you have noticed as you travel to different school environments?
Almost every school that I go to, where there is sharing, I hear, “There was a big party, and this happened.”
It’s usually vodka.
People spend a lot of time documenting overdoses and drug driving crashes, and those are things to look at. There is a myriad of other things that go wrong in communities that are alcohol-related that never get measured because they are almost unmeasurable. They leave what I call a shame scar.
They are much more regular and pervasive in a community. Vandalism, broken property, arguments between boyfriend and girlfriend, alcohol-induced fights between two boys, a prom that is ruined by alcohol because seven kids came drunk and they had to shut the prom down early. It’s all those types of things that happen a lot.
Alcohol is always my enemy in a community.
Drug trends come. Drug trends go. I’ll categorize the group that worries me the most: the Synthetics. That would include your spices (Synthetic marijuana, which goes under a lot of different names) and your bath salts.
The body doesn’t recognize synthetics as a natural substance, and the damage to the body is often permanent and unrecoverable. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but with marijuana, cocaine, and heroin (the last two can have foreign substances in them), the body can get them out of your system.
Cocaine can cause psychosis. I’ve gone through that personally, so I know what that’s like. After months of detoxing and clearing out your system, for the most part, you return to normal.
That is not always the case with synthetics. My worry is that synthetics become increasingly prevalent.
Every year, there is something that gets on the radar and scares the hell out of people.
Molly was the big thing last year. That is a combination of ecstasy and heroin. The symptoms of what happens when you are on it are that your body heats up, and sometimes people dehydrate and die.
Marijuana has such widespread acceptability that you have to have a different conversation in class with kids about marijuana. You can’t make up stuff about marijuana like those who were educated did years ago. So many kids are using it now, and so many kids are managing it.
Everybody has been worried about and continues to be worried about opiates. Those are just terrible drugs. They really are.
Once you become dependent, the physical need to resupply your body becomes intolerable, so you get into a lifestyle where you wake up every morning and have to get your fix. That has its own set of horrors attached to it.
What inspired you to write your book, Message in a Bottle?
Message in a Bottle is a very practical book. I just sat down and said what the twenty or thirty questions that parents ask me most often at parent meetings are, and each one of those questions turned into a chapter.
It was practical because people were leaving my talks at night and saying, “This is great, and I just wish I could remember what you said.”
I no longer do the intense travel I used to, and I only have a handful of schools I work with, so I wanted to capture everything I thought and felt about these questions in some form before I moved on.
I wrote the book from the standpoint of a person who spends all of his time in schools.
I spend my time in class every single day of the school year, so I felt like this was someone speaking from the front line. It’s just a different perspective.
Jeff has generously offered a copy of his book to one of our readers. Leave a comment to be in the running to receive Jeff’s book!
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Congratulations to Dawn for winning a copy of Message in a Bottle!
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