Born in Butler, the ‘Reality Tour’ changes lives coast-to-coast
CRANBERRY TWP — Parents and minors at the Reality Tour drug prevention education event at Hope Lutheran Church in Cranberry Township were startled when a uniformed police officer interrupted the proceedings to take one of the teenage attendees into custody for drug possession.
It didn’t take long before the organizers revealed this was merely part of the act. The police officer, as well as the student “arrested,” were reenactors. It was one of the many ways in which the Reality Tour sought to impress upon families the consequences of making the wrong choices in life.
“All of you are sitting on your winning lottery ticket,” said Lexie Elliott, tour director and member of the Reality Tour board of directors. “It’s your life. You just being here today is your winning lottery ticket. We want everyone to be able to achieve the things that they want to achieve in life.”
The Reality Tour — operated by the Community Action Network for Drugfree Lifestyle Empowerment (CANDLE, Inc.) — was a Butler County creation, started in 2003 to address a heroin epidemic. The Tour has since spread to six other counties in Pennsylvania, as well as parts of Arizona and California — the latter having been active for a decade now. Another offshoot of the Reality Tour is currently being organized near Cleveland, Ohio.
“When it started, there was a grassroots movement of how we can, as a community, come together to educate our community on the dangers of heroin,” Elliott said. “CANDLE, Inc. has advertised and promoted the Reality Tour as a program model that other organizations can purchase and put in their communities and some communities have taken advantage of this.”
The event Thursday night, March 19, was one of four dates in which the Reality Tour would run in the southwestern part of Butler County this month — two in Cranberry Township and two in Mars.
During the two-hour event, organizers caught parents and children up on new trends in drug abuse, including new types of illegal drugs that the creators of the original Reality Tour wouldn’t have imagined in 2003. These included synthetic marijuana, vapes and fentanyl.
One of the exercises the attendees undertook on Thursday night was to open packets of salt which were laid out on tables and carefully portion out six grains of salt, to simulate a lethal amount of fentanyl.
“I started volunteering and working with the program in 2009 and back then we were really talking about heroin and meth,” Elliott said. “Now we're really talking about alcohol, tobacco, vaping and prescription pills as the top pieces.”
At one point, organizers played a video telling the story of a teenager who died shortly after obtaining antidepressants through social media which contained fatal amounts of fentanyl. This was to illustrate the ease with which children can obtain illicit drugs through social media channels today.
The event was punctuated by a segment in which attendees were taken into a side room to witness dramatic re-enactments showing moments in the life of a (fictional) teenager whose life is derailed by addiction, including a day in jail, an overdose, his death in the hospital and his funeral. Other reenactors were used to portray the teenager’s grieving parents.
Toward the end of the event, a group of recovering drug users came in to tell their stories of how they nearly succumbed to their habits and how they managed to find their way to sobriety.
One of those was Bobby (who did not give out a last name), who developed a heroin habit at the age of 11 due to an unstable home environment. After spending six years behind bars, he has been clean since December 2018, He told the story of how he has spent the last six years trying to help others recover.
“For the last six years, I have worked in the recovery field. I help people get sober and stay sober,” Bobby said. “I have five sober living houses in Butler that I run.”
Bobby also mentioned that if he had gotten hooked on newer and harder drugs, such as fentanyl, he might not be alive to tell his story.
“My drug of choice was heroin and cocaine,” Bobby said. “And I'm grateful that when I was actively using, it wasn't fentanyl, because I probably would have died. Technically I probably shouldn’t even be here today.”
