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Fighting the Drug War: Save Your Kids
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16828 |
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LIFE
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9 / 1989 |
3,650 Words |
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Interview With Bill Oliver
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Bill Oliver, formerly an executive with a computer software firm in Atlanta, began working with PRIDE (parents resource institute in drug education) in 1979, when his sixteen-year-old daughter became involved in drugs. Now, the director of parent training with PRIDE, he conducts seminars from parents worldwide. In the following interview with life editor Robin Parker, he explains how tens of thousands of parents have been trained to help their children win the battle against drugs.
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W&I: How did your organization get started?
OLIVER: It started ten years ago in Atlanta, when some professors at Georgia State University began to recognize what was happening in the young segment of the population. They saw the younger kids getting high. They were shocked by what they were beginning to see and decided that the kids knew something that parents didn't know, and that was the drugs and the drug culture. A series of events led them to attempt to educate the parents in their community. They were originally focused on just the parents in their subdivision.
W&I: What does your organization do?
OLIVER: Our goal is to prevent drug use by children. Our focus is on those kids that are twenty-one and under, and frankly, now probably fourteen and under, because if you are really talking prevention and not intervention or breaking up something that is going on, you have got to reach kids not later than fourteen to do that.
W&I: Is there any way to measure how effective your program has been in the past ten years?
OLIVER: When you are talking about proving that something didn't happen, that is tough to do. One of the things that PRIDE does is attempt to measure the drug use by kids. We do that with a survey of kids, and drug use by kids is going down. In fact, one of the few towns in America that can document that they have reduced drug and alcohol use by kids is Bowling Green, Kentucky. Working with PRIDE in Bowling Green with that survey, they have surveyed the high school kids every year for six years now, and the kids' reported use in Bowling Green is going down.
W&I: Did they say why?
OLIVER: No one knows why. We know that education is a help. We know that active parents are a big help. We know that alert school people are a big help. But we can't pinpoint any one reason, but I'll tell you what I think it is. If you look at drugs in America, drugs are nor new.
What is new is the attitude beginning in the 1960s that the use of illegal drugs and the illegal use of legal drugs is acceptable. Our basic premise at PRIDE is, first and foremost, an attitude on the part of America that we tolerated the drug use. When we change that attitude, we change the use. The best example of that I can give you is what has happened with smoking in America over the last 20 years. The Surgeon General came out with a report that said smoking was bad. Virtually nobody stopped smoking. The Surgeon General a few years later, maybe five, six, seven years
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