by Alicia Desrochers
Staff Writer

Westford Academy is famous for being high-tech and cutting edge. We are always toting around the newest gadgets and installing the latest technology into the classrooms. Why, then, can we not stay ahead of the curve in the ever-changing world of drug abuse prevention?

Prescription drug abuse is growing drastically every single year, yet nothing drastic is being done to prevent it.

Westford Academy offers two different health classes- mandatory freshmen health and the optional senior health. But the two classes offer very different information, especially considering the topic of drug abuse.

Health teacher Melanie Jozokos, who teaches both of those classes, said that, “Senior health is more ‘in-depth.’”

Which means, according to Jozokos, that they discuss addictions and drugs more than a health teacher would be able to in a freshmen class.

That’s because the freshmen health course has to follow the required Massachusetts Curriculum, which emphasizes alcohol, marijuana, heroin, and cigarettes from the elementary classes through freshmen year. However, it glosses over the current trend of drug abuse; prescription drugs.

According to Medscape, a website used primarily by physicians, in 1999, around 2.6 million Americans were using prescription drugs illicitly. That number has risen to over 5.2 million Americans by 2006. In contrast, approximately 0.3 million Americans use heroin.

Prescription drug abuse has increased greatly in the last several years because, largely, people are so unaware of the dangers. In contrast, the trend of heroin use, which the health curriculum spends a great deal of time on, has not greatly increased in recent years.

Jozokos and another freshmen health teacher, Richard McElhinney, have come up with an innovative way to include a dire warning about prescription drug abuse in a curriculum that might not otherwise have room for it.

Jozokos and McElhinney have a PowerPoint that shows a series of pictures of a man, starting as a baby and going through childhood, high school, and college. The last picture is his obituary. He died of prescription drug overdose, still in his twenties.

While it is a powerful message, many students don’t remember it for too long after seeing the images up on the screen.

Jozokos explains this by saying that freshmen are too young.

“Most aren’t starting to do drugs yet,” she explained.

She thinks that maybe the age of fourteen and fifteen is too young to teach students about drug abuse. If the topic is not of immediate concern, then the students may not learn the information as well.

Yet students hear “do not smoke; do not drink,” from the very first elementary school health class and, for the most part, the message seems to stick. If the curriculum were changed to encompass the growing problem, namely the abuse of prescription drugs, then perhaps the message would have the same effect.

Perhaps, if the curriculum were changed so it evolved with the issues, then these drugs would be less of an issue. Elementary school children understand the dangers of smoking before they learn how to read. What if students learned the dangers of abuse of other drugs at such a young age? Would they be less inclined to experiment later in life? Would they understand that if the prescription says, “Joe Smith, Take two pills twice a day for one week,” then it means for Joe Smith only should take two pills twice a day for a week and no one else?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.