What if you woke up tomorrow morning and found yourself in the shower, eyes still closed and muscles still stiff but instead of scooting the shampoo’s suds around in your locks, you looked down to find a handful of those locks in your sudsy hand? What if you made your way to the kitchen and bit into a bright red apple and found bits of your own crumbled teeth inside?
Uncomfortable?
“That’s exactly what we want to do,” Jim Langford, Executive Director of the Georgia Meth Project said.
If you spend any time watching prime time television, whether your weekly fix is Glee, Gossip Girls or Lost, you have probably seen one of these anti-meth commercials. Discussion about these disturbing commercials has been going around newsrooms, classrooms, lunch rooms and family rooms for a while now, and a lot of people are talking about just how “gross” they are.
“Every once and a while I’ll get a letter from a parent afraid their child would see the girl in the bathtub and be frightened and have bad dreams, and we decided it was worth the risk. The reality is there are children living nightmares every day,” Langford said.
Who’s behind this?
But who is behind these nightmarish commercials and is meth really that bad?
The Georgia Meth Project, the folks behind these commercials, began with the ideas of a businessman named Thomas Siebel. Siebel wanted to come up with a way to prevent the rapidly growing problem of meth addiction.
Tons of dedicated people continue The Georgia Meth Project, each with his or her own story as to they care about the meth problem in Georgia. Jim Langford is one of them.
Langford grew up in Calhoun, Ga. and said he always appreciated the farm communities there. Though he moved away from Calhoun for a time, he came back 27 years later with his middle-school aged daughter and said his discovery was “depressing, terrible and sad.”
“I looked around and saw all these farms for sale. They were for sale because they became involved in meth and lost all their family money,” Langford said. “I grew up valuing community. To understand the fabric of the old farm communities is to understand the value of interconnectivity with families. It makes you feel whole and good and when you look back and see they aren’t the same community anymore because of meth and to see the children of those families go to jail, it’s a depressing thought to know everything you valued about community is crumbling.”
It was when Langford came back to Calhoun that he realized the meth problem in Georgia was so bad. He was offered a job as executive director of the Georgia Meth Project and eventually accepted.
“I knew it was a problem; it was just a bigger problem than I thought. I just realized that I could be a part of the solution” Langford said.
Is it reality?
The ad campaign in Georgia has been growing rampantly since its public appearance in January of 2010. Some people are wondering, though, if the ads are accurate and are leaving people scratching their heads wondering if one use of the drug can really turn them into a psycho, skin picking, hollow-faced individual.
“The meth commercials are reality. You’re a normal kid and as soon as you try it you’re hooked. The folks who come in here will tell you they were hooked the first time they tried it. You can’t stop once you start. Most meth addicts that show up on my door wanting help look like the people on the meth commercials,” Sandra Moore, Program Director of the Palm House Recovery Center in Athens, Ga. said.
Moore is not the only one who agrees that the commercials are reality.
“I think it’s a good way to scare people and it’s true; meth is death,” Gail Herrschaft, Director of Double Trouble in Recovery meetings held around the state said.
Not only are the horrors of the ads a reality, so is the prevalence of the drug and drug use among teens.
Moore said she began using drugs when she was thirteen years old. She’s been clean for 9 years but said the journey to get there was long and included encouragement from her parents, a support group and gumption to get up and keep going.
“You have to wake up every day and want to do something different,” Moore said. “I wake up every day and say that I’m going to live and not die.”
Herrschaft has a slightly different story than Moore. Though she also began using drugs in her teens, her children were the one's who intervened.
“I did drugs for 30 years, Herrschaft said.” I lost a lot of my teenage years, my 20s, my 30s and even some of 40s getting high. Getting clean was one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life.”
And meth doesn’t just find its way into farm communities like Langford’s. It shows up everywhere.
“It’s not just in the poor neighborhoods or the other side of the railroad tracks,” Moore said. “The disease of addiction does not discriminate against anybody. It affects people in nice neighborhoods with nice cars.”
Herrschaft said the same thing.
“It’s all over the place,” Herrschaft said. “You find drugs in the richest neighborhoods; they are everywhere. It seems like if you’re an addict, drugs find you.”
What adults wish you knew
Langford said teens are not the only ones these commercials are reaching, and there seems to be a few things adults were wishing teens knew.
Life is about tradeoffs.
“Are you willing to choose something and reap the rewards or suffer consequences?” Moore said. “Life is about making choices. When people are using they don’t stop to ask if their choices will put them in a 6 by 9, in a mental institution, or kill them. I always tell my nephews who are teenagers to stop and ask themselves to recognize there are always two things that could happen with what they do in life.”
Never be ashamed to talk about a drug problem.
Staci Pfeiffer, Licensed Professional Counselor and the Founding Director and Chief Inspiration Officer of The Banyan Tree Center thinks maybe some people aren’t getting help because of the bad rap meth gets in the social world.
“It has been stigmatized as trashy. The idea that it gets made in a trailer freaks people out,” Pfeiffer said.
Meth is even un-cool in the drug world. Addiction Counselor from Athens’ Recovery Café, Tommie Walton III, said he counseled a former drug dealer who got into some trouble with a meth dealer and said that if the guy had known, he would never have even talked to him.
“Even those who deal are prejudice of meth as a drug,” Walton said.
Addictions are unexpected.
Walton said he’s afraid teens will think the meth commercials are unrealistic and wants them to know that in the 37 years he has been practicing, no one has come into his office having thought they would eventually become addicted.
“Most of us wake up most mornings with a bias towards optimism,” Walton said. Most people think that way about using drugs. They think it’s all going to be okay”
Stats and stuff
Meth is deceiving. 35 percent of teens think there’s nothing wrong with trying it.
Meth is seducing. It sends the user’s dopamine levels 10 times higher than things like food and sex do, that’s why meth users are constantly trying to recreate their first encounter with meth.
Meth is expensive. It costs Georgia alone. 1.3 billion dollars a year.
Meth is awkward. 58 percent of polled teens say their parents have never advised them about using it.
Meth is dangerous. Meth is a factor in 42 percent of child endangerment cases in Georgia.
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