By Stephen Smoot
“I’ll be here all day!” said Bethany Perez of Potomac Highlands Guild to a student who stopped to chat as she set up her table in the commons. “Come by at lunch and win a prize!”
“It’s nice talking to you!” the student responded before continuing on to class.
Perez has invested a great deal of time in building relationships with the middle and high school student bodies, including coaching cheerleading. She brings that rapport with her, serving as the face of Potomac Highlands Guild’s anti-drug efforts with local youth.
Last Wednesday, Perez assembled an information table packed with pamphlets, charts, and other visual aids addressing the most popular drugs of choice among students who abuse them.
Her strategy was simple. Students come up to get candy offered at the table, then “they listen to my speech, take a test, and win prizes.”
Perez assembled a 15 question quiz that tests student knowledge of the harmful health and social effects of drugs and alcohol. Each question underscored a danger associated with drugs, such as number 14 which read “People who are heavy marijuana users reported (that they were) A. Happier, wealthier, and more dependable. B. Poorer mental health, poorer physical health, and lower life overall satisfaction. C. Less academic and career success, poorer mental and physical health, and lower life satisfaction. D. Weight gain, causing depression.”
Those who do well on the tests have a chance to win prizes, such as gift cards, goodie bags, and other items.
Perez is deadly serious about the dangers of marijuana and one of its popular derivatives. “Just in my experience,” she explained, “marijuana is very easy to get in this area. The youth think marijuana is a safer way to go.”
She then explained that marijuana has approximately 500 chemicals, many of which are known carcinogens. Also, studies show that one in six get at least psychologically addicted to the drug.
Especially dangerous is a manufactured derivative of marijuana known as “Delta 9.” Perez shared that Delta 9 comes from manufacturers isolating the agents in marijuana that is an important “psychoactive and mind-altering compound, the part that causes you to trip.”
She added that it sometimes “causes psychotic breaks and paranoid delusions.”
“That’s scary thinking you are just smoking weed and you go on a trip,” Perez noted. “I don’t think people know what they are smoking.”
Perez illustrates with visual aids how the drug affects each part of the brain from the cerebral cortex to the medulla.
Vaping also presents a danger to those who smoke it. Perez states that she wants “to make sure they understand it’s not better than cigarettes,” and in fact, vaping carries many of the same dangers, if not more.
She added that although alcohol consumption among young people has fallen since 2018, that drunk driving remains the number one killer of young people.
Overall, she emphasized that these and other drugs create special problems for young people, explaining that the human brain does not stop forming until a person has reached their 20s. All drugs cause some kind of damage to the brain.
Although the brain in many cases, but not all, can heal itself, Perez says, “The damage takes years and years to repair.”
Perez reported that those who earned prizes included McKenzie Vandevander, Isabella Jameson, Salou Sawyers, Jaiden Mitts, and Aubree Keiter.
