Two dozen heads snapped around as Trooper Jessica Clouse walked into the room at Monarch Place and went over to a boy in his late teens who had sat down moments earlier.

It had seemed innocuous a moment ago when he had draped his shoulder over the back of his chair. Now it was all anyone could look at.

“Is that yours? What’s in the bag?” asked Trooper Frank Cichra. “We just had a drug bust in the parking lot. We’re looking for a young male. Description sounds an awful lot like you.”

At the front of the room Norma Norris, who had been talking about the value of human life and the dangers boredom can present to young people tempted by the thrill of drugs, played along.

“Excuse me, there must be some mistake. This is Reality Tour,” she said.

Minutes later the young man was whisked away, under arrest Clouse said as she cuffed him, for dealing pills. Children and their parents were about to follow the course of the young man’s life.

Their first stop was a cell block, where the young drug dealer — his name, they learned, was Michael — passed the hours by telling the story of his descent from good youth to prison inmate.

Michael was conflicted but upbeat. He was in a rough patch, for sure, but he was smart. He had fooled his parents and teachers at school, after all. He was going to get out, get back to business and back to having a good time.

“There’s a whole lot of people who are gonna remember my name,” he told the crowd.

But minutes later, Michael was dead on a hospital bed.

Children and their parents signed a guest book at his funeral viewing and offered condolences to his grieving mother on their way back to the main room where Norris and three volunteers from George Junior Republic waited to tell their own real stories of drug addiction and recovery.

Norris, for her part, said the point she wanted people to go home with is that, if drugs are a gamble, like the lottery, the stakes have always been far too high to make the bet an acceptable one.

“We want people to be able to see beyond the next 10 minutes. The winning lottery ticket is ... you,” she said. “How many people are handing their whole life over to drugs?”

This is the opening act of Reality Tour, which is an anti-drug program Norris created 13 years ago and has been running ever since.

However, the program had problems last fall when state officials labeled the program “scare tactics” and said it lacked the proper scientific evidence that it was effective.

The state’s Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs has forbidden counties and school districts from using government money to pay to bring Reality Tour to their area, and researchers at state-affiliated universities and drug centers formally came out against the program.

None of that seems to matter to Norris and the people who make the Reality Tour work every month. They are a collection of people from all walks of life — from former teachers and mothers to teenagers and Cichra, who is a retired state trooper — who say they have all the evidence they need.

“If there’s a message to get across, I would say it’s ‘make the parents aware that it’s an issue,’” said Nicholas Helfer.

Helfer is 18 but has been coming to Reality Tour since he was 7 years old. His mother, Terri, started out as a tour volunteer and the program’s liaison to South Butler Middle School. Now she sits on the board of directors.

“It’s a different world today with kids and drugs,” she said. “The peer pressure is so much (worse) than when I was in school. It wasn’t if he was going to get asked the question; it was when.”

Helfer and his mother see Reality Tour as a way to fight back against the substances he sees tempting kids at younger and younger ages.

For the parents who spend their time volunteering with Reality Tour, the choice couldn’t be any more clear: Virtually everyone knows someone who has struggled or is struggling now with addition, said Marge Brewer, a former school teacher who has been a tour volunteer for more than a decade.

Brewer and another volunteer, Cathy Lippert, felt compelled to volunteer because of people in their lives. For Lippert, it was a sixth grade daughter for whom she said the program was a revelation.

“It made a huge difference in her life,” Lippert said. “She was just moved by it.”

So was Colton Bittner, a 17-year-old Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School student who volunteers playing Michael, the drug dealer.

Bittner said he’s had friends and family members overdose on drugs and works with the tour to push back against a trend he sees sickening and killing his loved ones and peers at school.

“It’s really bad. They call it (Butler High School) ‘Heroin High,’” Colton said.

“It’s not a scare tactic. We’re just trying to make it clear what the reality of drug dealing and using is.”