The headline crawled across the screens of smartphones across the United States a few days ago, and most of us barely noticed: “CDC: Drug overdose deaths spiked 21% last year, 64,000 deaths.”
The mind boggles at the inhumanity and enormity of the epidemic – someone will die of a drug overdose in the next 12 minutes.
Consider and compare the 64,000 overdose deaths in 2016 with the 58,220 U.S. service personnel killed in all the years of the Vietnam War.
Vietnam raged back in 1971, when marijuana was a “gateway drug” and heroin, cocaine and other illegal street drugs were the problem. President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs,” and the media covered it like crazy.
Now pot is legal in some form in 29 states and our nation’s capital. The drug crisis is driven by prescription painkillers and knockoffs from illegal cartels – and the death rate from overdoses is four or five times higher than it was when Nixon declared war.
We have tried 50 years of presidential commissions and drug wars as well as crackdowns on crack or methamphetamine or some other faddish substance of the moment.
It’s clear that we’ll never win the war on drugs on the supply side. The economics are compelling enough to draw newcomers to occupy any openings created by raids and arrests of suppliers.
We can’t arrest our way out of this problem.
We can’t wish our way out of this problem.
We must focus on the real solution: prevention.
Most importantly, we should offer kids incentives and rewards to prevent them from trying drugs, and we should drug-test them regularly (with parental consent) to ensure they are living up to the standards we set for them.
We should offer rewards to young people, starting as early as 11 and extending to 18, for forgoing the temptations of illicit drugs and prescription painkillers. These rewards could come in the form of gifts, social activities – a visit to a game of their local pro sports team, say – or, most effective of all, an investment in these kids’ future by awarding them partial or full college scholarships.
My stake in this is personal: My son Brent died of a drug overdose before his 25th birthday. It still stings more than a decade later – as if it happened 10 seconds ago.
We created the Brent Shapiro Foundation in a bid to build something hopeful out of such tragedy.
We now have real results from a pilot program by the foundation that takes an incentive-based approach, and they are so encouraging that I am hopeful that our methods could help the nation launch an actual and effective counterattack on the drug epidemic.
The foundation created the first Brent’s Club in cooperation with the Variety Boys & Girls Club in Boyle Heights, an area that’s no stranger to the toll drugs and addiction take on families and communities. We promised the youngsters there that we would help them with a college scholarship if they avoided drugs for their entire run in the program. Critical to this pledge was their consent to frequent, intermittent drug-testing.
Simple test
Brent’s Club turns a simple saliva test into a pep rally, as kids get their results within two minutes and cheer on one another for testing drug free.
Enrollment in that first Brent’s Club started at 25 members and now is at 1,300. Members receive recognition for hitting certain milestones. We recently took 150 kids to a UCLA football game, hailing them over the stadium PA system and letting them walk on the field and take selfies with players and coaches.
We haven’t had a single child fail a drug test in four years – although a few kids have bailed rather than show up to take it, demonstrating that there’s still much work to do.
A recent fundraiser for the foundation honored the first young person to graduate from all four years of the program. His name is Christian Sanchez, he is 18 and he never – not once – tested positive for drugs in his years in Brent’s Club. A college scholarship is in the works for Sanchez, who plans to study engineering.
We now have six Brent’s Clubs, and we dream of expanding nationwide. The Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Giants have signed up to support us.
In fact, Brent’s Club has been a little too successful. It has grown to a scale too large for the foundation to fund full scholarships for all who attend – the kids need more benefactors. Opioid drug makers and distributors should link up with us and invest, upfront, in prevention. Anyone else can help by donating at BrentShapiro.org/donate.
Prevention and incentivizing the young to steer clear of the substances that have destroyed so many lives can be our salvation.
I’ve seen it work for Brent’s Club, and I know it can work for the nation.
Robert Shapiro is co-founder of RightCounsel.com and senior partner in Century City law firm Glaser Weil Fink Jacobs Howard Avchen & Shapiro.
