It takes guts to teach young children about drug abuse.
And that is exactly what a collection of medical students from University of Chicago Hospitals brought to Robert Healy School in Bridgeport on a dreary recent morning that seemed perfect for the display of, to put it bluntly, the storytelling remains of dead drug and alcohol abusers.
Picture yourself in a classroom full of 6th-graders, all of them primed with loads of information about cigarette, alcohol and drug abuse and the price people pay over the long term for such devastatingly bad habits.
They have all been through the DARE experience, Drug Abuse Resistence Education, which has its critics but at least tries to plant the right message at an early age. But this drug education program seems to go a step beyond just about anything else.
You just can’t argue with a blackened slice of lung.
That’s what smoking does. Seeing it in front of you and hearing it all described by an engaging, friendly medical student might just plant a seed that develops into a firm “no thank you” later in life, when temptation beckons.
The same assumption is at work for the wrecked liver, the brain baked by cocaine or deadened by marijuana or the heart pushed too far by any number of abused substances: Maybe if you can see what will happen, it will help you to resist later.
The effort is called the Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention Project and it was born and developed at the University of Chicago. Funded by Irving B. Harris and the Harris Foundation, it has been in operation for 2 1/2 years and has drawn national recognition. It was recently adopted by the American Medical Student Association as its drug education program of choice.
The program reached 405 middle school students in 1995-96, when it began, 640 a year later, and 850 students are expected to be reached by the end of this school year. About 80 medical students a year have participated.
Val King is the 6th-grade teacher at Healy. She stands out of the way as four first-year med students carry plastic containers and boxes into the room. One of the med students, Sarah Adams, has a plastic bucket you can just about see through.
Inside, a brain floats in formaldehyde.
Med students Bryan White, Raymond Liu and Elliot Fauvus are leaning over the red plastic box and dipping deep inside. Someone produces red plastic plates, just like the ones you might use for a midsummer’s picnic.
A cancerous slab of lung, right beside a clean slab of lung, goes on the one plate. A cancerous liver and a liver with cirrhosis and a clean liver go on another. A heart that has been diced and sliced so that you can see inside goes on a third.
The mess drips formaldehyde all over the place and sends the scent of a sophomore biology experiment wafting across the classroom. The 6th-graders say “oooo” when the smell hits them. But not as loud an “oooo” as when they actually get to see the organs.
“Oh, gross,” says a girl.
“Yeech,” says one of the boys.
And then they get completely fascinated by the whole event, poking their fingers at (but not touching) the body parts and circling close around the organs as the medical students, now stationed at four locations around the classroom, start describing what had happened to each of the samples.
White is in charge. He reminds the kids that this is the second of three classes, and that they all saw pictures and talked earlier about the physical implications of drug and alcohol abuse. Now they were going to see those results.
White is on the liver.
He has a wonderful rapport with the children, never missing an opportunity to tell them their answers to his questions were awesome and peppering them with an endless stream of information about the implications of long-term alcohol abuse.
The bad livers look awful, of course. The children point to blossoming islands of cancer on the one organ, note that the liver from the person who died from cirrhosis seems as though it had been rolled in dirt and marvel at the relatively healthy appearance of the good liver.
“You know what cancer is?” White asks them. They try an answer, but no one gets the right one. White goes into a little story about two cells bumping into one another, with the cancerous one pushing hard on the healthy cell. Get a cancer cell beside it and the healthy cell stops working, he says. Get enough of them and a whole section of liver stops working.
At another table, Sarah Adams is as comfortable handling the brain in front of her as Julia Child is handling a dead chicken. Huge amounts of information are coming from this young woman as she separates the halves of the brain and shows the students how they are connected and what parts are affected by marijuana and cocaine. She notes that pot smokers sometimes get “the stupids,” which means they can’t make decisions, and she points to the parts of the brain where that business takes place.
Elliot Fauvus is working with the lung sections. There’s nothing much more dramatic in the world of “Don’t start smoking” than seeing a blackened, cancerous slice of lung. He talks about cilia in the lung that are killed when a person starts smoking, the role that cancer plays in shutting down parts of the lung and why lung cancer is such a fatal disease.
Raymond Liu has the heart.
He shows the students what veins and arteries are in the heart, then talks about what happens when heart rates are affected by cocaine and alcohol. He tells them exactly what happens when a person has a heart attack, and how clogged arteries can be repaired by grafting in veins from the legs.
Although they are pretty excited about the visit, the students don’t seem to have a lot to say about what they are seeing. There will be another session later to discuss these diseased organs and what they mean in a person’s life.
There is some question as to the value of these kinds of programs. No one has a measure of effectiveness yet and hardly any of them have been in place long enough to say whether they are working or not. In the interim, there are endless debates between supporters and critics, each armed with all the statistics they need to prove their points.
Gail Funk, the curriculum coordinator at Healy, which is 51 percent Asian and where some 19 languages are spoken, says she was looking for “something to knock their socks off.”
The DARE program, she notes, stops at the 5th grade, even though the school has been pressing the Cook County Sheriff’s Office to expand the program.
“The rapport of the U. of C. students with the students here has been amazing,” she said. “We are hoping to give them enough information so they can make the right decision if they face a problem later.”
It takes a lot of time to measure whether anything works in drug education, but the clearest explanation of the target might have come from White, who was questioned by one of the children as he was getting ready to pack up his diseased liver.
“Why do people do it?” one of the boys asked.
“Because not everyone knows what you know now,” he said. “You guys are awesome.”
