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Teens get empowered
to fight meth
By
Christina Moore, KP News
Members of the Key Peninsula Crime Prevention Task Force
gathered together on Jan. 10 and formulated the idea for a
Peninsula High School club called Teens Empowered Against
Meth. TEAM was created on the basis of three goals, but
the purpose of this club is to spread awareness on the
dangers of meth use and production to both community
members and students along the Peninsula.
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For information about TEAM or fighting meth, contact
TEAM adviser Dennis Taylor with Safe Streets at
884-7899. The members of TEAM will have a booth at
the Key Peninsula Community Fair on Aug. 19-21. They
will be lobbying pharmaceutical companies into
manufacturing their cold and allergy medicines
without pseudophedrine, the key ingredient to making
meth. |
Two of
the group’s current goals were planned to be put into
action by the end of June. One of them is a petition
campaign to lobby pharmaceutical companies into making all
their products pseudophedrine-free, because this is one of
the necessary ingredients of methamphetamine. The second
goal is the lobbying of local smoke shops to stop selling
drug paraphernalia. They are assisting the PHS
organization TATU (Teens Against Tobacco Use) with this
particular goal.
Sometime in September, TEAM will give a presentation to
middle and high school students about the dangers of meth.
The students are currently learning the material in the
presentation, which includes hazards, ingredients,
statistics, and details on what a meth house looks like.
 The
group consists of five PHS students who are determined to
spread awareness of meth, whether they have had personal
accounts with it, or just because they are against it.
Aaron Love, the president of TEAM, wants to save people
from the experiences that he went through and hopes they
will take something away from the upcoming events.
It may
seem that only five members will not accomplish any
expectation to an acceptable degree. On the contrary,
Ashley Chambers, vice president of TEAM, believes that
since teen-agers are presenting instead of adults,
students will be able to relate more to the material,
making a much more impressionable mark than anything a
teacher could say. And besides, “The more people there
are, the more ideas, but the less people there are, the
less conflict,” says Love. As long as everyone does their
part and practices, he believes that everything will be
successful because “it all depends on how they view it.”
©Copyright 2005-2008, Key Peninsula
News, all rights reserved.
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