Former DEA agent speaks on substance abuse

By Jason Klaiber

Staff Writer

During a forum sponsored by the East Area Support Network, former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Bob Stutman spoke to several dozen people at Fayetteville-Manlius High School about current trends in substance abuse.

“We are in the middle of the absolute worst drug epidemic we’ve ever had in this country,” Stutman said. “I don’t care what numbers you use.”

According to Stutman, more women are dying as a result of drug overdoses than they are from breast cancer.

He also said overdosing on drugs became the leading cause of death last year for people under the age of 50 and, furthermore, that the life expectancy of current middle-aged white men is lower than their parents and grandparents.

“It is not just a drug problem,” Stutman said. “It is a culture-changing epidemic.”

Alluding to the similar rise of LSD in the 1960s and the spread of crack in the 1980s, Stutman centered much of his talk around the opioid problem presently affecting the United States.

He said kids acquire these drugs after rifling through medicine cabinets, getting treated for a sports injury or going through wisdom tooth extractions.

He said young people also use drugs like Vicodin to escape academic pressures and the stresses of growing up.

“Most young adults do not use opioids to get high,” Stutman said. “They use them to assuage their emotions, because they’re so uptight all the time.”

He said that even as a drug expert with experience going undercover around addicts of all kinds, he encounters difficulty in picking out an opioid user.

“Your kid can be on OxyContin, and you won’t know it until he goes over the cliff,” Stutman said.

He said the opioid dilemma accelerated when pharmaceutical companies began advertising heavily, lying about the addictive nature of some drugs and shifting any blame to drug addicts.

“We are curing pain,” Stutman said. “We’re killing patients.”

Stutman also addressed the heightened purity of marijuana over the years and the commonplace occurrence of elementary school students consuming alcohol.

“We pretend it’s not our kids,” he said.

Stutman said parents often dismiss the idea of their son or daughter abusing drugs due to strong performance on the athletic field or in the classroom.

While it may seem drug use is insurmontable, Stutman had recommendaitons for families, encouraging them to be a resource for their children and be engaged as a family unit.

Stutman ended by saying an effective way for parents to combat this is to bring the family together for dinner as often as possible.

“Most importantly, love them all of the time,” he said.