A group of students is shining a light on the availability of drug and alcohol-related products in Union County.
At the regular North Union School Board meeting, the Union County Drug Free Coalition played a video presentation for the board from the Teen Prevention Leadership Academy. The group recently put together the presentation of their accomplishments over the past year, which included looking at how those products might target kids.
Nancy Beals, lead project coordinator with the Mental Health and Recovery Board of Union County, said they have helped work with some of the North Union High School students and run the Teen Prevention Leadership Academy this year.
“We’ve put together kind of a PowerPoint presentation…to hear the kids in their own voices about all the things that we’ve accomplished this year,” Beals said.
Students in the video said that they, along with adult staff, visited 20 different retail stores around Union County to observe the marketing of alcohol and tobacco products, as well as cannabis related products such as Delta H, Delta Nine and THC Zero.
They observed tobacco or alcohol products displayed next to kid-friendly products in 100% of the stores they visited. In many of those cases, students said product was within one foot of soda, candy and chips.
Council member Bradley DeCamp, who also serves as the district’s legislative reports person, said there was a bill that passed recently that says cities cannot regulate or restrict stores that sell products like vapes and alcohol.
“They can’t restrict them to where they open. So what that means is they could be put in close proximity to things like childcare centers, schools, that type of thing,” DeCamp said.
Also as part of their store audits, students in the video discussed how familiar companies such as Minute Maid, Lipton, Sunny D, Arizona, Mountain Dew and more have been putting out alcoholic versions of their popular non-alcoholic products.
“Two methods that companies use to generate interest in their products are to connect their brands to something that folks are already fond of, or to repeat an impression as many times as possible,” students in the video said.
Students also discussed finding Delta Eight products at smoke shops as well as the Short Stop and Buckeye Drive Thru.
“Delta Eight products can be particularly dangerous because kids think they are snacks or candy,” students in the video said. “However, they are in fact psychoactive substances that can affect the development of a young person’s mind.”
The Teen Prevention Leadership Academy students also conducted surveys that polled students from North Union and Marysville on different topics related to drugs and alcohol.
Students in the video discussed some of their findings. They found that 29.5% of students thought that drinking coffee or taking a shower would make them sober, 67% of students thought that holding marijuana smoke in one’s lungs resulted in a more intense experience and 100% of students agreed that vaping is not a safe way to quit smoking.
“Our goals of this survey were to understand the common perceptions about alcohol and drug use amongst our peers,” one student in the video said.
Trent Hoge, co-facilitator of the Teen Prevention Leadership Academy, said the students felt they really benefited from the experience.
“I think that all three of the students have voiced that they learned a lot through the program (and) that there’s a lot of information that they felt that they hadn’t received in their normal health curriculum that they learned through us,” Hoge said. “Being able to promote that for them, they said that made a big impact on them.”