“Hey, you’re a doctor. Do you know what this is?” a fellow mom inquired as she thrust a small yellow pill into my palm. “Where did you find this?” I asked, examining the pill. “I didn’t. My 4-year-old daughter did in the classroom,” she responded. “She picked it up off the ground and hid it in her cubby all day.” Upon examination, this particular pill appeared to be a vitamin. But its potential to have been something much more sinister left us both shaken. Our children were safe…for now. Some kids aren’t so lucky.
The topic of opioid overdoses makes the news almost nightly. Our proximity to the Mexico border lends Arizona to be the largest state trafficker of illicitly-produced fentanyl in the nation. An opioid typically used to manage severe pain, it is illegally synthesized by drug cartels to entice, entangle, and harm our most vulnerable populations. Fentanyl is also a common and elusive co-contaminant of other drugs and deceptively formulated to impersonate popular candies, such as Smarties or Skittles. These pills, designed to trick an unsuspecting consumer (a child, for example), contain a dose of fentanyl capable of killing the average American adult in 70% of cases. These synthetic pills are readily accessible to our youth via social media avenues such as Tik Tok and Snapchat. In fact, our children are their targets. The Arizona Child Fatality Review Program estimated at least 80 deaths due to opioids between 2021 and 2022 and 132 overdose events in 2023 alone. And with no state requirements for overdoses on school campuses to be centrally reported, these numbers are likely underestimates.
So, what is a parent to do?
I confess, the classroom incident left me feeling uneasy. My professional expertise was toe-to-toe with my maternal instincts. I knew too much. And our children know too little. What, when and where could they learn the hard facts of this epidemic without learning the hard way?
Thanks to a new taskforce formed in partnership with the Arizona Department of Education, these questions are being answered. The School Training and Overdose Preparedness Intelligence Taskforce (STOP-IT) initiated in May 2024 with the purpose of ensuring every Arizona kid is educated on the dangers of synthetic opioids and staff are trained on how to use the life-saving opioid-overdose medication, naloxone.
The taskforce is comprised of a diverse group of carefully-selected experts in the fields of medicine, education, government and behavioral health. From superintendents, to school counselors, to physicians, to drug intelligence officers, parents and even students, members have assumed a gargantuan undertaking: end opioid overdose deaths and prevent addiction in our kids. The more than 60 members serve on a curated list of subcommittees dedicated to tackling all aspects of the opioid crisis in schools. This includes ensuring staff and students have naloxone available in all educational buildings, creating policies and procedures for school districts to adapt so staff can administer the drug and train on it, developing a statewide school survey to understand barriers to naloxone use and building a statewide overdose reporting system to make sure school overdoses are tracked at a state level. But rising to the top of their to-do list is ensuring students and staff receive standardized, impactful training on the dangers of the illicit drug trade and how to recognize its consequences.
Already primed to see movement on this topic and well-versed in the worlds of medical school education and healthcare quality, I was thrilled to join the taskforce as the Chair of the Best Practices for Staff and Student Education STOP-IT initiative. There is no shortage of work ahead of us. The subcommittee is already hard at work meeting with national and local experts and examining existing curriculum to develop a best training practice. The subcommittee has identified curriculum ‘must-haves’, such as ensuring age-appropriate (6th through 12th grade) content, being culturally sensitive, existing in a modular electronic format with no in-person training requirements, proving cost-effective and easy to implement. Most importantly, the curriculum must incorporate a host of trackable metrics that can monitor student engagement, product satisfaction and ultimately impact on overdose rates. To keep the content relevant, discussions on including social media influencers to promote STOP-IT’s message are also in the works.
With taskforce meetings well underway and a statewide survey evaluating the status of naloxone preparedness in Arizona schools in the hands of more than 2000 school leaders, we are beginning to understand the current state of the state. The taskforce has a robust timeline with plans to employ curriculum in early 2025.
If you are reading this article, you are likely an engaged, Arizonan parent. That makes this topic deeply personal. The opioid epidemic is now endemic and the drugs are equal opportunity destroyers. Assumptions that overdoses only happen to “bad” kids who buy and sell drugs is a gross misunderstanding of current state and a misinterpretation of the science that drives addiction. The real epidemic is about the 12-year-old who goes on Tik Tok looking for a pill to help concentrate for an upcoming test and overdoses on a sadistic counterfeit. It’s about the child looking for social acceptance who falls quickly into peer pressure and quicker out of consciousness. It’s about kids just like yours.
So what can parents do?
The first step is to get educated! The book ‘Ending the Crisis: Mayo Clinic’s Guide to Opioid Addiction and Safe Opioid Use’ is an excellent resource to help both young adults and parents understand now to navigate the opioid crisis. Readers will learn:
- How prescribed opioids differ from street drugs
- How opioids change the brain to cause addiction
- Ways to prevent, identify and manage an opioid overdose
- Evidence-based, successful treatments for opioid addiction
- The role of boundaries, interventions and communication in opioid addiction
- Much more!
The book is filled with engaging, heartfelt testimonials of people who have lived the opioid epidemic and offers hope to readers.
Parents, we need your help. These are our children. Let’s take them back. Remember, it’s never too early to start talking to your kids about drug safety. Kids who have these conversations with their parents are 40-50% less likely to use drugs. And keep the conversation going. You can’t overcommunicate the dangers of drug use in 2024. As parents, we need to step up, speak out and take back what’s ours. It’s time to break the drug trade’s grip on our children’s future. It’s time to STOP-IT.
For more information, please contact schoolsafetysocialwellness@azed.gov or visit azed.gov/stopit
- Krystal Renszel, DO, MS, FACP, Chair, Student and Staff Training Subcommittee, STOP-IT Task Force
- Holly Geyer, MD, FASAM, Chair, STOP-IT Task Force
- Mike Kurtenbach, Co-Chair, STOP-IT Task Force
Resources:
- Song for Charlie: Real Talk About Fake Pills (songforcharlie.org)
- Natural High: Fentanyl Toolkit – Information and Resources on Fentanyl (naturalhigh.org)
- Drug Enforcement Agency Operation Prevention: Opioid and Prescription Drugs (operationprevention.com)
- Sold Out Youth Foundation (soldouttv.com)
- DEA: One Pill Can Kill (DEA.gov)
- Community Bridges (communitybridgesinc.org)
