Reality of addiction far-reaching
It took Tracy Hack about a year to realize her daughter, Melissa, was using heroin.
“She hid it extremely well,” the Butler resident said. “I think I found a needle, at some point. Then, when I started asking questions, her initial response was denial of course.
“When you start asking questions to other people she's associating with, places where she's going. You find out, yeah, it is true.”
The stories in this series revolve around the long-term, environmental harm growing up around addiction can reap. Experts and scientific evidence suggest those impacts are far more widespread than minors actually turning to hard drugs while they're still children.
But it happens, and as Hack knows now, it happens in Butler.
Today, she serves as Butler County Community College's coordinator for Hope is Dope, a recovery group in town. The organization tries to provide addicts with tools to get and stay sober.
Back when Melissa picked up drugs, however, Hack wasn't so informed. Melissa is her oldest child, and she was still attending high school in Butler. Hack and Melissa's father divorced during Melissa's junior year of high school.
“For the first few years that she was using, I had no idea what to do except to ask her to stop,” Hack said.
It all started for Hack's family back in the early 2000s. Hack said the concept of hard drugs making their way into high schools was new at the time, and that resources for parents were scarce.
Around the same time, the Seneca Valley School District implemented a drug testing policy to curb the new trend that Hack saw manifesting in her daughter.Matt McKinley, the district's assistant superintendent of secondary instruction, oversaw that initial rollout of drug testing.“I expected a very negative response, but there really was not a lot of pushback,” McKinley said about the community's reaction.A 2002 Supreme Court decision prevents blanket testing of an entire student population. Instead, districts like Seneca Valley require students to opt-in to drug testing as a requirement for various activities. Sports, some clubs and parking on campus all commonly require signing up for random drug testing.“The first year of the policy, our student parking permit sales dropped drastically,” McKinley said. “Once they hit junior year, most kids can drive. I was asking a lot of parents, 'Your kids talked about driving for so long, now they're not interested in driving. Why would that be? What's changed?' Well, we have a drug testing policy now.”In Seneca Valley, a student overdose largely inspired officials to start testing students for signs of drugs in 2002. The same is true of the Butler Area School District, which began testing last year after a student died of a heroin overdose in 2017.
In nearly two decades of testing, Seneca Valley had plenty of students test positive for marijuana and alcohol. Those substances trouble administrators, but very rarely do harder drugs show up in test results.Matt Franz, director of operations for Sport Safe, confirmed that the same is generally true nationwide. Sport Safe is a Powell, Ohio, based drug testing company contracted by both school districts. It provides drug testing in 120 school districts in 13 states.“It's a big step to start popping pills, you know,” Franz said. “Maybe 95 percent of what we're going to see is marijuana or alcohol.”Franz said there are reasons their figures wouldn't match reality. All school drug testing is voluntary; meaning a segment of the student body in every participating school district is never tested. The program focuses on deterring drug use, he said, not catching young users in the act. The threat prevents more than the actual punishments, Sport Safe maintains.As for marijuana and alcohol, Franz believes usage among minors has increased along with cultural normalization.“Perception of risk has gone down, while usage has gone up,” Franz said.Compare national studies to Franz's estimates and it paints a similar picture.In 2018, 2.8 percent of children ages 12 to 17 misused some type of opioid, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), an agency in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that studies and reports drug usage. That includes both heroin use and misuse of prescription drugs.Heroin use alone is so rare in that age group that the federal agency reported a 0.0 percent usage rate in 2018.Marijuana was used by 12.5 percent of children ages 12 to 17 in 2018, the agency reported, while 9 percent of such children were estimated to have drank alcohol in the past month alone.The Pennsylvania Behavioral Health Barometer, another study by the federal agency broken down by state data, reported in 2017 that the average percentage of children ages 12 to 17 estimated to have used marijuana in the past month was 6.2 between 2014 and 2017, nearly half the national percentage reported just one year later. During that same time frame, the average percentage of children in the same age range estimated to have drank alcohol in the past month was 10.8.The same research tool tracked heroin use twice, once between 2013 and 2014 and again in 2014 and 2015. It maxed at 0.55 percent of Pennsylvanians 12 or older, but “the annual average percentage in 2014-2015 was not significantly different from the annual average percentage in 2013-2014.”In 2018, 3.7 percent of children in the nation ages 12 to 17 had a substance use disorder.In Pennsylvania, just 0.1 percent of students reported using heroin in the 2017 Pennsylvania Youth Survey. The same is true for methamphetamines and crack. Cocaine use was reported by 0.3 percent of students, and narcotic prescription drugs by 1.3 percent. The survey is taken by eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders.Like Sport Safe, Seneca Valley administrators describe their testing policy as a deterrent. Superintendent Tracy Vitale said she hopes their tests have prevented at least some students from adding to the statistics.“It gives our students the ability to say 'no' under pressure,” Vitale said. “It gives them the excuse to say 'No, I can't, I'm on a team.'”
Those statistical figures, however small, represent real people with real stories. Butler, unfortunately, has served as the setting for some of those stories.These days, Melissa is clean, though she's currently in prison for violating parole. She wasn't regularly calling her parole officer as required after previously racking up drug-related charges.Hack mourns all the problems such early drug use piled onto Melissa. There are simple skills her daughter doesn't possess.“The ability to follow through, the ability to do what you say you're going to do, be at work on time every day,” Hack said. “Things we take for granted because we weren't having all that chaos in our teen years where we were shooting stuff into our bodies that affected our brain.”Melissa had two bouts of homelessness. She would sleep under cars, or in unlocked sheds, Hack said.Those were some of her child's lowest points.Hack has two other children. Her son, the middle child, also struggled with addiction. He began using drugs after leaving home. The misadventures of the older siblings kept her youngest away from drugs, Hack figures.Ask Hack about those years, and she describes the “collateral damage” to her family and friends that Melissa's addiction caused. Aside from the older children, she thinks about how those years affected her youngest daughter.“When you have little ones that are growing up with people in addiction,” Hack said, “the adverse experiences in childhood will carry right into their adult lives and can ruin them for the rest of their lives.”
Butler County's District Attorney, Richard Goldinger, plays hardball when it comes to substance abuse. His 2017 “Not In My Backyard” campaign publicly aimed to crackdown on drug offenders in the justice system by pursuing harsh sentences.But ask Goldinger if he sees lots of children in court for serious drug charges, and the answer is “no.” That's not among the leading problems faced in the DA's office.As far as children are concerned, Goldinger's worry is more along the lines of Hack's: what affect the real and present addiction has on children, long before they may or may not take up drugs themselves.“My daughter is 11,” Goldinger said. “Children that age, if their parent overdoses, they understand it. It impacts them.”Vitale sounded similar. Whether students in her district are using or not, she's certain they're feeling the impact of addiction.“I feel that the addiction issue is much greater than we realize in this county and that it manifests itself in other ways,” Vitale said. “I do think that it's an epidemic.”
At 6 p.m. Monday, this month's Hope is Dope event is inviting the public in to hear stories of hope and recovery.The celebration is at the Butler Art Center downtown. Speakers will be sharing their stories of recovery in hopes of inspiring others who are struggling in the community.The event is free and will include music and crafts for children. Those who wish to share their stories will be welcome to.
