Prevention Makes a Difference: Meet Chris Kelly, Part Two

This is the second part of my interview with drug education teacher, Chris Kelly on how prevention can help.

Your videos are fantastic. I noticed you focused on marijuana in your first video. Can you share your thoughts about medical marijuana, legalization, and how parents can discuss this topic with their teens?

It is really good to understand that there is technically no such thing as medical marijuana. There’s just marijuana. When a drug dealer or grower is growing marijuana, they don’t grow special marijuana for medical use and other marijuana for toxicant use. There is just one kind of marijuana.

That is a key element in how I or anyone should think about medical marijuana. Marijuana is an intoxicating drug that some people use for medical purposes. They could say the same thing about Vicodin or morphine or any drug.

There are people who use it properly and there are those that use it improperly. The people using marijuana for medical release from suffering, illness, and injuries, etc. I have no problem with that.

How many people who have marijuana cards have legitimate needs and how many people are just getting stoned? That is the question that probably really can’t be answered.

I’m not opposed to medical marijuana, but I am opposed to marijuana abuse and marijuana addiction. I’m really concerned about adolescents using marijuana, more so than I am about adults.

As far as legalization, I’m not a pro-legalization advocate, nor am I a person that thinks, “Oh my God, the world is going to end if we legalize marijuana.”

One way I look at it is the illegalization of marijuana has been a pretty abysmal failure, so perhaps it’s worth experimenting with legalizing marijuana and finding out if marijuana use goes up or down. Would highway fatalities go up or down? Would the job injuries go up or down? We need to research this.

There are ways to do research. Holland has had marijuana legalized for nearly 30 years. Alaska had marijuana legalized for 15 years. The research can be done. It really needs to be done.

What we’ve got instead of research being done, is that we’ve got two states that legalized marijuana last year without having a mechanism in place on how it is going to be sold, distributed, and taxed. That, to me is a catastrophe.

They legalized it before law enforcement came up with a way to detect and test drivers on the side of the road. Legalizing is just one aspect of how it is going to affect the culture.

Everyone who wants to smoke marijuana does, whether it is legal or illegal. There are hardly any people who are saying, “I would smoke weed, but I just don’t want to break the law.”

That’s a very small percentage of human beings. Most people just smoke marijuana if they want to and don’t if they don’t want to.

I just hope if they do decide to tax it, the money goes to prevention and treatment. If there are savings from enforcing the law, I hope that money goes to prevention and treatment. My concern is that it won’t.

I believe a parent needs to know intimately about how they feel about legalization, about medical use, and more importantly, how do they feel about adults using marijuana recreationally.

How do they feel about teenagers using marijuana to compensate for their emotions?

You could be a parent who says, “I’m pro-legalization for adults. I’m pro-medical marijuana for sick people and I’m dead set against teenagers smoking weed to get high. That is not a conflict of interest. It might be how they feel. It’s okay to feel that way. It’s okay to explain to your child that you feel that way if that is how you feel.

You need to really think about those three issues; adults using marijuana for recreation; teenagers using it for recreation or because they are shy; adults using if for medical reasons.

Some teenagers smoke marijuana because they are nervous or shy. That is a different situation than someone that is using it to celebrate something good happening in their life.

Compensatory drinking is much more addictive than celebratory drinking.

We all have things we are trying to compensate for. A kid who drinks to have fun at a party is less likely to get addicted than a kid who drinks so they can get in the door of the party.

Most people think everything is black and white. There are gray areas around driving and drinking, alcohol addiction, and adolescence. They aren’t black and white. There a lot of shades of gray.

The parent still has the right when they are parenting their child, to be clear about their family rules, their family values. They don’t have to have wiggle room in their own family values and rules. The can be very firm about them. I think that helps.

I’ve talked to kids that don’t use a substance and they say, “I know what would happen if my mom found out.”

A lot of the kids who use feel there is wiggle room. They might say, “My dad would be a little upset, but my mom wouldn’t really care.”

They’ve learned what they can get away within the family system.

Even though I don’t have children, I can tell you this. I believe a parent can do everything wrong and have their kid turn out fine, because of the weirdness of the world.  A parent can do everything right and have their kid turn out messed up.

I really believe that’s how powerful drugs and alcohol are. You can be the 100% perfect parent and still have the kid turn out to be an addict because the substances have amazing power over a human being.

Things like logic and willpower seem like a joke.

I went into drugs looking for freedom. Freedom from self, freedom from being a 15-year-old boy that didn’t like how he felt, looking for relief from ADD that I didn’t know I had. I built a prison, moved into it, and wondered who put me here.

What are two important things that parents should know with regards to teen substance abuse?

1. Understand that addiction or alcoholism is a mental health problem that can happen to anyone in any family from any background.
2. Understand that you didn’t cause it, you can’t cure it in your child. You can set boundaries. You can offer help. You can be a good example.

Should parents reveal their drinking or drugging background?

When your child asks you, “Did you take LSD? Try cocaine? Smoke weed? Get drunk before you were 21 or 18?”

You look your child in the eye and tell them, “If I told you I did, you might think I’m giving you permission, if I told you I didn’t, you might think I don’t know anything about LSD, cocaine, or underage drinking. I’m here to answer questions, I’m here to help you. I’m here to guide you, but I’m not here to talk about my private life.”

The reason that that answer is so effective is that it’s considered sometimes by some child-rearing experts to be an inappropriate intimacy for a teenager or a child to know too much about their parent’s lives, especially their parent’s inner life.

Very few parents would feel the need to explain all about their sex lives when they were teenagers or college students, but think they are supposed to talk about their drug or alcohol life. They are a similar type of private issue.

For the parent who is known to be a recovering addict or alcoholic to their child, this is not going to work at all. For someone who has not used alcohol in their lives, this is not a good answer, but for a lot of parents, this is a good answer, because it keeps the private life private.

It says to the kid, what do you want to know about underage drinking? Let’s find out. Let’s do some research. Be willing to talk about the issues, but not necessarily whether you inhaled or whether you got drunk or whatever.

What drugs do you feel are most prevalent with teens these days?

• Alcohol is always number one, the most popular and also the number one killer drug of young people. That is often misunderstood or underestimated by parents. Alcohol overdoses are a large part of adolescent deaths from possible substances.
• Marijuana is always number two and again often misunderstood drug. Many kids and many parents just feel like it’s harmless, safe, or innocuous and I just don’t agree.
• Tobacco is usually third, but prescription drugs are up and coming and becoming more and more of an issue every day. Misuse of prescription drugs concerns me greatly because it’s so difficult to detect for parents and teachers.

Cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana all have strong odors, strong visual symptoms and pills are very concealable and very hard to detect until someone is nearing an overdose. It concerns me that kids can get away with so much pill use during the day right in front of their mom or dad. They can pop a pill right when they are having a conversation with you.

Your kid could be on Xanax and you might not even know unless you know the signs and symptoms.

What kids tell me is that it is kind of obvious that sniffing a drug, or injecting a drug or smoking a drug is bad for you. It’s kind of obvious. Pills have an aura of safety.

There is no damage as they go in. Kids are taking vitamins, baby aspirin, and a whole wealth of over the counter drugs. We’re training our children to be drug users through the advertising of medicines on TV, not to deal [with your issues], just take something.

I believe there is a connection between consumerism and drug and alcohol addiction. If you look at American culture, we are the leading consumers of water, wood, gasoline, paper, cocaine, marijuana, heroin. We’re the leading consumers of those products. We consume more than anyone else.

We incarcerate more of our citizens than any other country on the planet. There is a connection between those figures of how many people consume substances and how many are incarcerated. Those figures are directly connected.

The culture is 5 percent of the population, with 25 percent of the prisoners, consuming 50 percent of the illegal drugs. That’s America.

Chris has some openings in his schedule and is interesting in talking to schools that would like to have prevention education classes, workshops, or assemblies for their students of all ages or parents. He does consultations, trains people for doing interventions, and works with administrators with policy issues. Contact him at his website to find out more. 

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CHRIS KELLY has conducted prevention education classes, workshops, and assemblies since 1995. He has worked at hundreds of schools in 9 different countries and has personally educated over 50,000 students. Chris experimented with drugs as a teen out of a deadly combination of ignorance and curiosity. He quickly became addicted. Despite loving parents and their attempts at intervention, he stayed addicted for 15 years. Entering recovery in 1990 he found his passion for prevention education and has never lost the joy of helping young people and their families

We don’t tell your kids WHAT to think. We ask them to PLEASE THINK before they make their decisions about tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs.

You can find out more about Chris at Prevention PLUS,  and follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.