Teens get empowered to fight meth

Christina Moore, KP News Members of the Key Peninsula Crime Prevention Task Force gathered together on Jan. 10 and formulated the idea for a Peninsula High School club called Teens Empowered Against Meth. TEAM was created on the basis of three goals, but the purpose of this club is to spread awareness on the dangers of meth use and production to both community members and students along the Peninsula. Two of the group’s current goals were planned to be put into action by the end of June. One of them is a petition campaign to lobby pharmaceutical companies into making all their products pseudophedrine-free, because this is one of the necessary ingredients of methamphetamine. The second goal is the lobbying of local smoke shops to stop selling drug paraphernalia. They are assisting the PHS organization TATU (Teens Against Tobacco Use) with this particular goal. Sometime in September, TEAM will give a presentation to middle and high school students about the dangers of meth. The students are currently learning the material in the presentation, which includes hazards, ingredients, statistics, and details on what a meth house looks like. The group consists of five PHS students who are determined to spread awareness of meth, whether they have had personal accounts with it, or just because they are against it. Aaron Love, the president of TEAM, wants to save people from the experiences that he went through and hopes they will take something away from the upcoming events. It may seem that only five members will not accomplish any expectation to an acceptable degree. On the contrary, Ashley Chambers, vice president of TEAM, believes that since teen-agers are presenting instead of adults, students will be able to relate more to the material, making a much more impressionable mark than anything a teacher could say. And besides, “The more people there are, the more ideas, but the less people there are, the less conflict,” says Love. As long as everyone does their part and practices, he believes that everything will be successful because “it all depends on how they view it.”    

For information about TEAM or fighting meth, contact TEAM adviser Dennis Taylor with Safe Streets at 884-7899. The members of TEAM will have a booth at the Key Peninsula Community Fair on Aug. 19-21. They will be lobbying pharmaceutical companies into manufacturing their cold and allergy medicines without pseudophedrine, the key ingredient to making meth.