Busy Week, It Ain't Over

It's Thursday and I just finished 3 presentations today to students at Basehor Linwood High School. On Wednesday I did one presentation there. On Tuesday I was at Shawnee Mission East High School all day with hourly presentations. On Monday I was at the Climax Springs School District in Climax Springs, MO and did two presentations, one to grades 10-12 and one to grades 7-9. I usually tone down my presentation for the younger students.

I'll be back at it again tomorrow. On Friday it will be a new experience and different presentation. The students I am speaking with tomorrow have already heard my stock presentation. A new teacher that is an RN is teaching a new class to students interested careers in the health field. They are studying addiction and because her students have heard my first talk we put our heads together and came up with a different game plan.

The study plan for tomorrow is a group discussion. I provided a number of terms related to addiction and recovery and the teacher created student teams to research the terms and we are having a group discussion about what they have learned. My role is to provide advocate or devils advocate in these discussions. Students are to talk, listen and think deeply about addiction and recovery from a medical perspective.

Here is the list of terms I provided and they have been researching:

a)  12 step programs, AA, NA, Al-Anon and Nar-Anon

b)  Harm reduction programs

c)  Tough love

d)  Chemical recovery agents

e)  Medically supervised detox vs. detox

f)  Suboxone, Vivitrol, Methadone, Antiabuse

g)  Narcan, is it good or enabling?

h) CRAFT, Community Reinforcement and Family Training

i)  Rehab models, ie. 12 step, boot camp, wilderness, etc

j)  Legal and illegal drug models. is the war on drugs working or do we make them all legal and treat addiction

This what I provided the teacher and tomorrow we will see how much I learn. I'm suppose to be the resident expert and that makes me REAL nervous. Feel free to provide me any thoughts, I'm going to need them. I'll be with some pretty smart students.