What is a strong Education program?
What makes a strong Education program?    

  
How best to know if the Education program is working? By the end of this article the answers may present themselves.

When troops go into battle they do so with all the current information they can get. The troops want and crave information.

In our community alone we have a bloody battle going on and that battle is wreaking havoc everywhere. What's the battle? It's alcoholism and addiction. It's that simple. For battling alcoholism and addiction the same battle plan applies. Information is needed and the information needs to be the truth.

Just stand in a corner in any store that sells alcohol during the time people are getting off work and see what happens. You'll see lots of people buying alcohol. Of those people buying alcohol a surprising number of them are consuming those purchases in the cars they are driving as they go home.

"No way!" You say.
"Yes." I say.

Those single, double or even triple cans or bottles purchased are for the car ride home. Look out the window while you do your study and you'll those people popping the purchase open as they're backing out of the stall they were parked in. We even had people show up at the legislature testifying that its okay for hired hands to drive with an open container after work. It'd be fun to find out how many of our people who were elected to represent us drink and drive.

When you get home look in the paper in a few days on the police blotter. There you might just find some of the people you watched checkout while you were standing there. It always appears so harmless. Buy some beer, buy some wine, proceed through the line and then out to the car. There shouldn't be a price tag with that scenario but there is. People love their pleasures and rarely think of the consequences of their actions.

That mentality is what is driving the problem. We in Montana believe it's our right to drink and drive. The industry that supplies the drink will toss a token ad in the paper that says "drink responsibly" but they will do nothing past that.

I was at a meeting of Toastmasters. Part of Toastmasters is what is called table topics. A woman there was asked this question: "if you could speak to the high school students about drinking what would you say?"

She paused gathered her thoughts and then proceeded to scare me to death. She told us that if she was speaking to the student body her message would be don't drink, " wink-wink." Drinking is bad and we shouldn't do it, "wink-wink". She went on for a few more minutes with the same talk but I was sitting in the group stunned.
An age old quote passed through my mind watching and listening to that lady talk. "We've met the enemy and the enemy is us."

She, in a simple few moments, proved why Education is so vital. The points need to be repeated over and over again for years. It's true. Ask any industry that has education as part of it's life and they will tell you the same thing. Dentistry still hands out tooth brushes for that simple reason. People know they need to brush their teeth but they don't. Gun owners tell you unloaded weapons never hurt anyone yet we still have tragedy's each and every year. Education in those industries prove the power of Education and prevention alone. Another industry that has Education as it's cornerstone is the cigarette industry. In just a few years time we have taken cigarette smoking to where it is today. My question has been this for a long time. We, as a community, have been dealing with the smoking issue and we have dealt with it really well. We have even turned our attention to the issue of second hand smoke and the ramifications of that problem.

But as a community, and a State, we have not even started dealing with the problem of Alcoholism and we have not even started to crest the hill to look at the problem of second hand alcoholism. Those two concepts need to be looked at and they need to be dealt with in a manner that benefits everyone. We grew up as a Nation of smokers and within a relatively short span of time we were able to curb the problem that smoking cost us as a Nation. The same thing can be done to Alcoholism. We enacted strong Education to teach the nation about the problems with smoking. We kept those messages clear we kept them strong and we kept them coming. Even today we are still using the same tools that were used at the beginning of the campaign. We didn't travel down sticky side roads and get stuck. We kept our eye on the ball and turned the problem around.

Today there is a growing generation of young people who have been severely affected by alcoholism and drug addiction. Those young people were sitting in mother’s womb’s while mother was drinking or using drugs. They were helpless to do anything and they grew up in an environment where the price they paid for living was extreme.
When we think about those scenarios we think of the inner city not the towns of Montana. But even here in the towns we love, there are young children with that heritage. Go look at our schools and see what the teachers of the elementary schools are dealing with. Those teachers and we, as tax payers, are paying the price of poor Alcoholism Education. How much further down the road must we travel? We all know the facts of drinking. We all know the truth about the problems of driving and drinking. We all know what happens when people become stuck along the side roads in life with alcohol. But do we truly do anything about it?

Ask the police department or the parole departments about the problems with Alcohol and drug addiction and they will tell you it scares them. Especially when the subject of drugs comes up. The recidivism rate for drug users almost reaches one hundred percent. Those people are stuck in a system that is stymied. Only strong education and implemented intervention tools will be able to help us. If we start with the young people and teach them, we can start fostering a generation that is ready and able to deal with the problems that come from Alcoholism and Addiction.

Education programs can teach parents that they can take back their homes and they can confront the Elephant as it passes through the Living Room. They no longer have to tolerate behavior that is unacceptable. They can be taught to take back control and they can be taught how to do it with help We have learned from the past that the cost of Education and Prevention is cheaper than that of dealing with a full blown illness. The cost to the taxpayers is less and the cost to the community is less. The best thing for us as a Community and a State is to look up and find an Education system that has proven itself over a period of time. We don't need to find the latest fad and unproven trend and try that. We need something that has a proven track record. Out there in the Nation are Education programs that work. We had one in Bozeman, some years ago in the TALK project. We either find one that good or re-implement the one we had with all the power it once had.