The majority of Loudoun County Public School students aren’t using drugs, school leaders said at a recent meeting, but those who are tend to misuse alcohol, marijuana and electronic cigarettes, among other substances, and have developed new ways to hide them.
At last week’s school board meeting, Jennifer Evans, the division’s director of student mental health services, said most students are making healthy decisions with regard to substances. However, the students who misuse substances lack refusal skills and make decisions that may be influenced by mental health concerns, family stress or other conflicts, Evans said.
The trends are also driven by students who are impacted by peer pressure, navigating anxiety and depression, have ambitious goals and want the stamina to study all night or are naturally curious, Evans said.
The presentation didn’t include data but laid out trends among students.
“We all went through some of those stages,” Evans said. “But the decisions we had to face at our age back then were not deadly. There weren’t mistakes that we could make that would kill us. And now we have that with fentanyl.”
The school division is hosting a series of community fentanyl awareness events, and Evans said it’s commonly found in pills that are made to resemble drugs such as Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Percocet, OxyContin and Vicodin.
Some students who have prescriptions will share the drugs with other kids, she said, but “what we’re seeing now is the pills having fentanyl.”
“Kids are buying these illicitly believing they’re actually these drugs, and not knowing there’s fentanyl in them,” Evans said.
But, Evans said, there are other concerning trends that are emerging.
Students, she said, don’t seem to be socially drinking alcohol. Instead, they’re binge drinking and finding drinks that have higher percentages of alcohol in them. They’re also mixing alcohol with caffeine.
E-cigarettes are also popular but have consequences, Evans said. For one, teens who start vaping are more likely to start smoking traditional cigarettes. When students use vaping devices, they’re “breathing in droplets of liquid chemicals and toxic metals into your lungs,” Evans said.
Some students are using marijuana cartridges, or carts, which Evans described as a highly concentrated form of the drug. THC is extracted from the marijuana leaf, making a waxlike substance that is put into devices and smoked. The THC content is usually 80-90%, Evans said, so some students overdo it, which is colloquially called “greening out.”
“It can cause agitation, psychotic symptoms, nausea, hearing voices and distress, which can look like a psychotic break,” Evans said. “So we have seen that and then found out it was because a student admits they smoked marijuana.”
An emerging market for devices to hide drugs poses another challenge for school leaders. Some hats have pockets in them, Evans said, and there’s a new type of sweatshirt on which the hood’s string is actually a vape. There’s also a stash-pocket backpack, she said.
The school district is taking steps to increase awareness about the dangers of drug misuse with campaigns for both students and parents, Evans said.
More information about how the county is working through substance use patterns is available online.
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