Teenagers and adults from diverse ethnic backgrounds came together at the High Point Neighborhood House Center on Nov. 18 to come up with strategies to stop drug use and prevent HIV infection in addition to discussing prescription drugs and the energy alcohol drink ban.

The coalition takes an updated approach to stopping drug use amongst young people from ethnic groups in southeast and southwest Seattle.

“The idea is to come together with lots of different folks to create a safe and healthy environment for southeast and southwest Seattle to promote positive youth development, prevent drug, alcohol and tobacco use and to do HIV prevention,” said Mike Graham-Squire with the coalition.

“A lot of drug and alcohol prevention programs focus really on education … (that) tell kids to say ‘no’,” Graham-Squire said. “But we really try to do, although those education things are important, is to look at how we can change the environment that youth are growing up in so that it will be a more positive and healthy environment to prevent kids from using drugs in the first place.”

Graham-Squire said the coalition uses four strategies to reach their goal, which includes looking at social norms (unwritten rules of family and community), policy (written rules and laws in schools, government, etc.), access (limiting the access to drugs and alcohol and increasing access to services) and media and advertising (limit tobacco and alcohol advertising and promote positive advertising).

The meeting, which included several teenagers from Teens Against Drug Abuse, broke up into five different groups. Each group was tasked with looking at data from south Seattle on either alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, prescription drugs or HIV/AIDS and coming up with proposed environmental prevention strategies. Once the time was up, each group shared their ideas.

“What you guys just did … in 25 minutes … (is) what we are supposed to do in the Drug Free Communities Program throughout the whole year,” Graham-Squire said. “Look at what the local conditions are and what the data is and try to figure out what sort of interventions we can come up with to make changes.”

Margaret Shield with King County Local Hazardous Waste Prevention spoke to the coalition about the problems with prescription drug use and disposal in Washington.

“It’s really an epidemic,” Shield said. “It’s the fastest growing type of drug use out there and it can be really deadly. More people are dying of drug overdoses than in car accidents in our state right now.”

“You need to store them safely and they need to be locked up away from kids and teenagers and when you don’t need them anymore you need to dispose of them safely because we are finding out medicines are getting out into our waterways,” Shield added. “They are in our drinking water supplies in really small amounts and we don’t know yet what the impact of that is, but think about taking a glass full of water and adding a bunch of medicines to it and drinking it – that’s not good.”

Shield explained the Take Back Your Meds campaign (http://takebackyourmeds.org/) that is trying to make it possible for people to turn in medications they no longer need any day of the year instead of a few times a year.

Shield said 9,000 pounds of medicine were “taken back” statewide in September, but she believes there needs to be a constant place to drop them off anytime, adding that (although the law is in the process of being changed in Washington) pharmacies are not allowed to take back narcotics and budget cuts mean state and local governments cannot take them back regularly.

“We are asking (drug manufactures such as Merck) to become part of our partnership and please help us with the financing because right now the state doesn’t have much money, the local governments don’t have much money,” she said. “If the drug companies would partner with us we could make this happen and it really wouldn’t cost very much money for them because they sell $4 billion worth of medicine every year in our state so its just pennies for them.”

Ruthann Kurose with the Washington Liquor Control Board also attended the meeting and spoke about the recent ban on energy alcohol drinks in Washington.

“One of the reasons that (energy alcohol drinks) were banned is because of the growing evidence that suggests these drinks are a dangerous mix that can cause health and safety issues,” Kurose said. “We’ve been getting a lot of reports from hospitals and from health officials that … students were ending up in emergency rooms.”

“These products are really dangerous because they fool young people … (because) the caffeine masks their level of intoxication,” she added.

Kurose reminded everyone that the banned drinks had to be off the shelves of stores in King County as of Nov. 18 and encouraged anyone that saw the drinks for sale beyond that date to contact the liquor control board.

Kurose also commended the work of Teens Against Drug Abuse (TADA) who, last summer, went out and took photographs of businesses throughout West Seattle to find out how many of them were in compliance with the state liquor board’s rule that limits the number of outside alcohol ads to four.

Two members of TADA presented a slideshow of their findings. They went to West Seattle stores (no bars) with licenses to sell alcohol and found that 18 stores were “good neighbors” with zero ads, 18 stores were “okay neighbors with one to four ads and 15 were “bad neighbors” with five or more ads publically displayed.

The South Seattle Drug Free Communities Coalition is funded by the Whitehouse Office of National Drug Control Policy and has been in operation since 2004, according to Warya Pothan with Neighborhood House and the coalition. She said the coalition has helped bring it around $4 million in funding into Seattle and King County through the many grants they have received over the years.

Graham-Squire said the coalition originally focused on helping youth in the Cambodian community, but they have now expanded it to include other ethnic groups in southeast and southwest Seattle.

For more information on Neighborhood House and the South Seattle Drug Free Communities Coalition, visit http://www.sngi.org/projects/dfc.php.