New London High School students lead forum on addiction
New London — For a brief moment, nearly all of the students seated in the first few rows of the New London High School auditorium Tuesday morning were raising their hands.
Principal Tommy Thompson, during a pause between the sessions of a student-led forum on addiction, had just asked how many of them knew an alcoholic or drug addict.
"Almost everyone knows someone with a substance abuse issue," Thompson said after the forum concluded.
"If we can arm students with information to help their family members and their community, then that's what we want to do and this is a great platform to do it," he said.
During the four sessions, which lasted about 20 minutes each, members of organizations such as Community Speaks Out and companies such as CVS joined forces with students to tackle everything from the way addiction changes the brain to where and how students can get help.
In one of the talks, 30-year-old Westerly resident Christa Quattromani spoke of her own struggle with alcohol and drugs.
A 13-year-old when she first tried alcohol, Quattromani said it was different for her than for others right away.
It made her brain "light up like a Christmas tree," she said, and she knew she wanted more.
In the next several years, there were signs that what she was doing was more than experimental — she once ended up at the hospital getting her stomach pumped, for example — but "it's easy to miss the writing on the wall that you have addiction in your future," Quattromani said.
"When you're in college and caught up in the culture of partying, it's easy to think, 'Well, that's just what kids do,'" she said.
But her 20s, she told the students, led her through a stint in rehab, a yearslong period of sobriety, a relapse — this time involving opioids — and then overdose after overdose.
"There's a reason the drinking age is 21," Quattromani said. "It's not to keep you from having fun. If you're predisposed to addiction ... if you wait to drink or use drugs until after you're 21, your chance of becoming an addict decreases phenomenally."
A good student who ended up participating in gymnastics while getting her bachelor's degree at the University of Pennsylvania, Quattromani said she remembers not giving the DARE officer much thought when he talked with her and her peers about crack, heroin and other drugs in grade school all those years ago.
"I thought just because I smoke a little marijuana and drink a little alcohol, I'll never lose control," she told the students.
She said she thought "I'll never become an addict because I have a plan for myself and it doesn't include that. But addiction doesn't care what your plan is."
Now three years sober, Quattromani said she has to be careful with every step she takes.
When she received Sprite in a cocktail glass over the weekend, she asked a family member to make sure there wasn't alcohol in it before she took a sip.
"That sounds overly dramatic," she said. "But I cannot have one sip of alcohol because my brain will light up like a Christmas tree again. It's exhausting."
"Maybe if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have picked up drinking when I was so young," she told the students.
Reflecting afterward, multiple students said they didn't realize addiction was a lifelong affair.
"I thought it was crazy that Christa told us she'll be dealing with this every day for the rest of her life," one student said. "That even when she's at her best friend's wedding, she's going to have to think about not drinking."
Earlier in the day, Lisa Cote Johns, a founding member of Community Speaks Out, tearfully addressed the room as she described the first time she found her son with a belt around his arm, a needle inside it, his fingernails a shade of deep blue.
She used CPR to revive him that time, she said, but the next time, on Oct. 2, 2014, there was no such chance.
Christopher Johns was 33 when he died of an overdose.
"You don't have to be ashamed for having an illness," Johns said, explaining that Community Speaks Out hosts support groups and rallies and has helped get more than 40 people into treatment.
"If you know of anybody who's suffering, or if you are suffering yourself, you can call me," she said. "If it's 2, 3 in the morning, I don't care. Even if you just want to talk. You don't have to be alone."
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