Pubdate: Tue, 21 Nov 2006
Source: Daily Herald-Tribune, The (CN AB)
Copyright: 2006 The Daily Herald-Tribune
Contact:  http://www.dailyheraldtribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/804
Author: Debi Ruhl

DRUGS JUST KILL, WARNS MR. CLEAN

Although he goes by the name Mr. Clean now, Mike Ryan wasn't always 
able to live up to that squeaky image.

Once a drug addict who spent years in and out of jail, Ryan has spent 
the last several years trying to make up for his past by helping 
vulnerable kids with their futures.

As the founder and CEO of Clean Scene, an Edmonton-based drug 
education group, Ryan has talked to more than 200,000 people at 200 
schools and events since 2002 in an effort to encourage youth to make 
positive choices.

"At Clean Scene, we're all recovering addicts that have been speaking 
publicly. For me, that's 15 years of speaking to young people across 
the province," Ryan said at a community presentation in Grande 
Prairie Monday night.

"Everyone needs to know that if you put this stuff in your body, it's 
going to cause some damage. There's a reason you cough the first time 
you do drugs. It's your body saying, 'Get this stuff out.' There is 
so much that parents and kids need to know. If you're going to be a 
druggie, you might as well put a bullet in your head because that's 
what it's going to do to you."

Ryan, who was born and raised in Alberta, first got hooked on 
morphine and other painkillers during a stay in the hospital as a 
child. His first youth convictions were at age 13 and he spent more 
than six years incarcerated for drug trafficking and armed robbery.

After his release from jail in 1989, he ended his involvement with 
drugs and has stayed clean for 18 years.

"An addiction is a compulsive disorder. It's not something you have 
willpower over. No one wants to be an addict but there are only three 
places an addict ends up - jail, an institution or dead," Ryan said,

"I spent 6 1/2 years of my life locked away because of my involvement 
with the drug scene. It can happen to any child. I came from a good 
family. The opportunity to score drugs is there. Every community has 
got it and they usually come cheap."

Ryan is in Grande Prairie to help kick off National Addictions Week, 
which runs Nov. 19-25. Grande Prairie RCMP, the City of Grande 
Prairie's Community Crime Prevention Unit and the Grande Prairie and 
Area Drug Action Committee teamed up to bring him here.

While most people walk into one of Ryan's sessions expecting a lesson 
on crystal meth, marijuana and crack cocaine, Ryan says street drugs 
are only part of the issue. The two leading drug killers in North 
America are even more readily available.

"The number-one killer drug in North America isn't meth and it isn't 
crack cocaine. It's tobacco," Ryan said, adding tobacco kills 30 
times more people than any other drug. Similarly, alcohol is the 
second-leading cause of death by drugs, killing five times more 
people than street drugs.

"We need to do a lot more about drug prevention and include tobacco 
and alcohol as well. These two are drugs, too, and we need to start 
changing our thought process around this."

Although peer pressure has long been a factor in kids deciding to 
pick up a cigarette or a drink for the first time, Ryan says parental 
approval has become a major contributing factor in recent years.

"To put it simply, if the parent is a user, the child is 300 per cent 
more likely to become a user as well," he said.

"Also, many people don't know that it's illegal to advertise 
prescription drugs in Canada. A number of companies still do that and 
that makes young people think that drugs can solve any problem. We 
live in a culture of drugs that is the single worst time in history. 
I don't just talk about street drugs because they are only part of 
the problem."

It's a problem, he says, that can be helped by increased education. 
While Ryan and his co-presenter can only realistically get to about 
80 schools each per year, he wants to be able to reach so many more.

"The challenges we have are education and prevention, harm reduction, 
treatment and enforcement. Education isn't just posters and 
pamphlets. It's people working with people," he said.

"We can do more if we get kids to understand what they're doing to 
themselves. It's not just kids, we have to educate society. I have a 
lot of friends who have recovered and gone on with their lives, but 
we're in the minority. If we can save one kid each time we go out, 
that's something amazing. There are too few of us willing to get out 
there and talk about it. Most of us are embarrassed about our pasts. 
I'm not embarrassed. I don't like what I did and I'm not proud of it, 
but it was 21 years of me being stupid. We need to get out there 
every chance we get."

The minimum standard for any Clean Scene speaker is he or she must be 
sober for at least five years and already be out in the community 
trying to make a difference. Currently, Ryan is working to recruit a 
few more people but has to wait a couple of years before they're 
ready to meet those criteria.

"Using younger people is the future but we're not quite there yet," he said.

"We have to be very careful about the message we give. It's not easy 
work but we want to be in every school in Alberta every year. That 
might not be realistic but it's a repetitive message. We need to 
focus on kids and empower them. They're disempowering each other 
every day so we have to do anything we can to give kids the right message."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Elaine