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October 19, 2007
Hard Pill To Swallow
Phil Jacobs
Executive Editor
Robert M. Stutman, a retired Drug Enforcement Administration special agent, was speaking to a group of area businessmen recently at an airport hotel. The focus of this meeting was to talk about how drug abuse impacts the workplace. But before Mr. Stutman, a former Randallstown resident now living in Florida, got to the office, the business execs wanted to know about their own teenagers, and what they were facing out there.
Mr. Stutman took the sugar-coating off of the figurative pill. He had everyone in the room on the edge of their seats.
A former CIA agent who entered the DEA in the mid-1960s, he remembers when the entire agency consisted of about 250 agents instead of the thousands now employed. The drug of fear back then was heroin. As long as it was contained on the poor economic side of town, white middle-class apathy would keep concern at a low level.
Agent Stutman said that turning points happened in the 1960s and ‘70s when drug buys could be made on college campuses, mostly marijuana. He started seeing, as he put it, “nice white kids using drugs.”
“LSD changed it all, because it was a drug the college students tried and they loved. But,” he added, “there was a difference in white society when it came to using LSD and something like heroin.” That difference, he said, was simply the use of a needle to inject heroin.
That needle, he said, is no longer necessary to ingest heroin. So heroin is now not uncommonly found in middle-class and wealthy white neighborhoods, including Jewish communities.
There is also another twist to all of this. During the 1960s and ‘70s, mostly during the Vietnam War era, there was a tremendous amount of rebellion going on. Teens and college students, in particular, weren’t interested in what was in their parents’ medicine cabinets. They wouldn’t touch any of those pills, simply because their parents used them.
That has all changed.
“I don’t know of anyone who predicted pharmaceutical use by teens,” he said. “But now we have more pharmaceutical users than club drugs and cocaine put together. We have so many screwed-up systems, we are almost bound and determined to let things get incrementally worse. Doctors know almost nothing about substance abuse. They couldn’t diagnose it if it was stuck in their face. Most pediatricians fail basic tests of diagnosing drug abuse. And plus, how many rabbis have been trained in substance abuse? And that’s a huge problem, because for many Jews, the first person they go to for help is their rabbi. Look at any seminary, there’s virtually no training.
“Plus, how many parents know about drugs,” he continued. “How can you discuss an issue if you can’t express the same language as your teens. We don’t know the language. The kids fool us constantly. We’ve got to train ourselves. We’ve got to teach the school system; they need to take a far more active role. School systems generally drop the ball, and so do parents. When someone sticks drugs in front of their 12-year-old child, have parents prepared that child to deal with it? Responding to the drug offer the correct way doesn’t come by accident or by divine intervention.”
Mr. Stutman added that every parent of a teenager needs to go onto the Internet and sites such as MySpace and Facebook and type in their kid’s name or their kid’s high school.
“Most of us would be shocked,” he said. “Most of us Jewish parents do everything we can to give our kids the edge. I know Jewish parents who spend thousands of dollars to test kids to get them through AP [Advanced Placement] classes. How many of us do that on the drug issue? We don’t pay attention to it, until we need to.
“In the Jewish community, there’s a complete apathy and lack of knowledge about people (drug dealers) who would kill their kids,” he said. “Drugs, we’re Jews, we don’t do that.”
Mr. Stutman said that Jewish parents do a great job of teaching their children to be intellectually curious, so why wouldn’t these same children be curious about drugs.
“You hear such myths,” he said. “One teenager tells another that Oxycontin is not addicting, because you don’t go into withdrawal. The truth is it is extraordinarily addicting. Then you hear that marijuana is not addicting. It is. And the marijuana that your kids are smoking is not their parents’ marijuana. It’s about 12-15 percent more potent than the marijuana you might have smoked.”
He added that the drug problem appears to be slightly higher than the national average among Jews.
“Please keep in mind that these figures are anecdotal and not particularly hard,” he said. “I can tell you with absolute certainty that the drug problem among Jewish adults and teens is at least as bad as the national average.”
What about Pikesville? Is it on the figurative substance-abuse map?
Without question, answered Mr. Stutman. “Pikesville has a reputation for drug abuse, not so much among adults, but mostly among kids. Jews teach their kids to be intellectually curious. Well, there’s a negative side as well as a positive side to this.”
He shocked the group of executives in a way when he asked them what they thought was the No. 1 way to combat drugs among teenagers. His answer was simple:
“The number of times a week you have dinner with your kids.” Studies, he said, have shown that the simple conversations over dinner combat the dark side of a teenager’s life.
He then compared drug use to a communicable disease. Diseases, he said, aren’t likely to self-cure. A chain of infection has to be broken. Polio, he said, would have been terrible, had the chain not been broken.
Mr. Stutman told the story of an interview he did with an intelligent, upper-middle-class high school student who was in recovery for Oxycontin use. The teen told him that Oxycontin made him feel warm and safe like he was being hugged in his mother’s arms.
“We can create a drug that synthetically produces the feeling of a mother hugging her child. Can you understand how powerful that is?”
Then he seemingly answered his own question.
“I see a lot of dead kids on drugs,” he said, “and I see a lot of kids who would have been better off if they were dead.”
So what’s happening out there now? Heroin, he said, is being found now in high schools where it can be smoked or snorted. A heroin fix, he said, is less expensive than an individual Oxycontin dose. Addicts, he said, grind up the Oxycontin, getting an immediate fix instead of a time release as the dosage is made for.
And then there’s LSD or acid, which he said is gaining in popularity with a vengeance. This includes “stamp” acid, which is applied on the back of postage stamps, and so-called “Bayer” acid, which is absorbed into the popular aspirin tablet, because it doesn’t have a coating.
At the meeting with the business executives, he defined some of the terms mentioned above.
“Cranking” is another name for the ingestion of methamphetamines, which the older generation used to simply call “speed.”
“Pharming” is basically raiding the medicine cabinet and taking your mom’s pills. Teens, he said, are looking for the drugs with the stickers on them warning against operating machinery, driving and to expect drowsiness.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, he reiterated, teens would never take these pills, because they would be associated to the very people they were rebelling against, their parents. Now, according to Mr. Stutman, the rebellion is over, and the pills are part of addictive behavior.
Kids often die, he said, when they pass out on the drug and then vomit. He added that a person who has passed out should be flipped on their stomach to help avoid the impact of the vomiting.
There are “fruit salad” parties where participants bring every pill they can find at home, put it in a bowl and make it available to the partygoers. Mr. Stutman said that on some of these Internet sites frequented by teens, it’s not uncommon to find the phrase “into fruit salad parties.”
He talked about “Ecstasy,” which he called the “hug drug.” But it also causes the muscles in the jaw to clench. A giveaway if this is being used is if you see a teen or a young adult sucking on a baby pacifier or a candy pacifier.
Two of the more dangerous drugs out there are “roofies” or Rohypnol. This is the date rape drug. It is dropped into a woman’s drink and produces a twilight sensation. Then there is Ketamine or “Special K,” which provides a disassociative high and some say a near-death experience.
When Mr. Stutman was speaking of these substances, he didn’t have to refer to one single note to explain to his attentive audience what was going on.
This was one of three meetings he was presenting on behalf of the CEO peer support group TEC, run by Ben Griffith.
“In the middle market of companies, the problem is that CEOs don’t have people keeping track of these things,” said Mr. Griffith. “We all think we know. But I can tell you that in front of three separate groups, including a group of younger people, no one knew any of these terms. And these terms will be used by the work force of tomorrow.”
Mr. Griffith said that the first time he heard Mr. Stutman’s presentation, it was “alarming.” The second time it was “scary,” and by the third time, it was “depressing.”
Two of Mr. Griffith’s CEO members are bringing Mr. Stutman back to the Baltimore area to do six more presentations. In the meantime, Mr. Stutman addressed faculty members at Goucher College on these issues.
“The messages all stuck,” he said. “You do not think that a slightly overweight, bald Jewish guy from Boca Raton knows all of this.”
For the executives, the numbers he presented were daunting.
Some 17 percent, or one of six U.S. employees, has a substance- abuse problem.
The direct cost of a substance-abusing employee is reflected in absenteeism, turnover, production, pilferage, violence, medical benefits and accidents, according to Mr. Stutman.
Some 70 percent of the time substance abusers are involved in an accident where they don’t injure themselves. Alcohol, he said, accounts for 70 percent of substance-abuse- related accidents. And marijuana, he explained, changes the depth perception in the average user for some 48 hours. There is also a high rate of something called “return to work syndrome,” which typically means abusers sometimes find it difficult to return to work on Monday or after a holiday.
Mr. Stutman then went through with the CEOs policies that their companies should consider. He covered everything from abuse of prescription drugs to corporate discipline of offenders to the use of adulterants. When he asked the CEOs what adulterants were, nobody really knew.
Adulterants are what drug abusers use to turn a drug test negative. The adulterant masks the presence of the substance in the urine or bloodstream.
Issues in the workplace are so critical, he emphasized. Companies need to keep in mind what their policy is when it comes to taking clients out for an alcoholic beverage. Some companies, he said, won’t allow their employees to drink, but do permit them to buy drinks for their clients. There are also issues that are important when it comes to “safety sensitive” employees, or workers, who for example, operate machinery. Do they come to the company happy hour? What happens if they are on a prescription medication that warns against operating machinery?
When he got back to the discussion of teens and substance abuse, Mr. Stutman said that many parents live by the “not my kid” way of looking at all of this. He said that some of the nicest kids he’s ever met are addicted to drugs and have been killed overdosing on drugs.
He also cleared up any racial stereotypes that there’d be any hint at all that blacks dominate the drug scene. Some 78 percent of substance abusers, he said, are white.
Mr. Stutman concluded his presentation by talking about alcohol abuse.
He said that alcohol is a drug, and that it is more addicting than most drugs, yet it is legal.
“People drink beer during their lunch break like it’s a different flavor of Dr. Pepper,” he said.
“You need a written substance-abuse policy,” he concluded. “You shouldn’t be in a position to make it at the time of an incident. As an employer you have to be able to look in the mirror and say to yourself, ‘I tried my best.’ That’s the best you can do.”
You’re a parent of a teenager or preteen.
Quick quiz:
Do you know what “cranking” is?
How about “pharming”?
Ever heard of “roofies”?
How about “fruit salad”?
Methamphetamine?
Ecstasy?
Oxycontin?
Rohypnol?
Ketamine?
Know your teen-ager? Maybe they know one or two of these words. Perhaps they know them all.
Finding what they know and don’t know saves lives.