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Hazleton Area claims WVC track crown behind Cusatis, Grula

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Greater Hazleton parks project to honor late 4-year-old

<p style="text-align: left;">Last week, the state&#8217;s top law enforcement official visited the Wyoming Area Secondary Center student body to tell the teenagers they could play an important role in helping with the ongoing opioid crisis.</p><p style="text-align: left;">We applaud our new Attorney General Josh Shapiro for his outreach efforts. He plans to talk to many other students in many other communities during his time in office.</p><p style="text-align: left;">If it helps just a few young people stay clean, it&#8217;s worth it.</p><p style="text-align: left;">We also agree with Shapiro when he says authorities simply cannot &#8220;go out and arrest drug dealers and solve the problem.&#8221; It&#8217;s going to take a lot more, he believes, like &#8220;changing the culture and mind-set.&#8221;</p><p style="text-align: left;">His message to the students was they can start that culture shift themselves by discouraging other teens from shooting up heroin or popping pills &#8212; the root of our opioid crisis &#8212; and also by making sure when people do get hooked, they get the help they need.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Shapiro&#8217;s presentation got us thinking about how drugs became such a big part of the culture in the first place.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The answer could be linked directly to another addiction society has been struggling with &#8212; addiction to celebrity.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Want proof?</p><p style="text-align: left;">The same day the AG was talking to Luzerne County&#8217;s youth, the Associated Press sent out a story on a new kind of opioid combination that has authorities worried.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The substance has been nicknamed &#8220;gray death,&#8221; and it&#8217;s so powerful, it could be dangerous just to touch. It contains one opioid called carfentanil, which is used to tranquilize elephants, and another known as U-47700. (We assume the &#8220;U&#8221; stands for &#8220;U should never put this stuff in your body.&#8221;)</p><p style="text-align: left;">The AP story points out pills taken from the great musician Prince&#8217;s estate contained U-47700. The pills were confiscated after Prince&#8217;s overdose death last April.</p><p style="text-align: left;">That&#8217;s right, Prince died of an overdose, just like 140 others did last year in Luzerne County.</p><p style="text-align: left;">But you might have missed the OD part of Prince&#8217;s obituary because the national media and just about everyone else &#8212; blinded by his celebrity &#8212; seemed more interested in hailing this man&#8217;s musical abilities than bluntly calling him what he was: a drug addict.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The same thing has happened countless times before when famous people die under far-less-than-honorable circumstances. Instead of pointing out their misdeeds, and justifiably knocking them down a few pegs in the public&#8217;s perception, there are all these flowery tributes about how so and so will be missed and how so and so&#8217;s fans are grieving and cannot bear the thought of going on without them.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Blah, blah, blah.</p><p style="text-align: left;">It&#8217;s all nonsense.</p><p style="text-align: left;">But it illustrates the power of celebrity and how that world &#8212; notorious for drug abuse &#8212; has over the decades led society at large to accept illegal drug use as part of the culture.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Within 30 seconds of when we turned on Sunday night&#8217;s MTV Movie and TV Awards, there were rapper Snoop Dogg and lifestyle maven Martha Stewart on stage together with some lame bit that was an obvious reference to Snoop&#8217;s well-known weed habit.</p><p style="text-align: left;">An instance like this might seem innocuous enough. But you have to remember, someone like Snoop has far more sway over young people than Pennsylvania&#8217;s attorney general. Snoop&#8217;s lighthearted attitude about marijuana, times about a thousand more things like that a young person might see or hear before he/she turns 18, and it&#8217;s easy to calculate how America has become a nation of addicts.</p><p style="text-align: left;">So, as well-intentioned as Shapiro&#8217;s strategy is, the culture change is not going to happen unless and until we shed our addiction to celebrity.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And that starts by bluntly, but not cruelly, pointing out whenever possible what Prince, Whitney Houston, Philip Seymour Hoffman and other famous overdose victims honestly were &#8212; idiots not idols.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Tough talk but true talk. Parents, repeat that message at home. It&#8217;s our only shot at real culture change.</p><p style="text-align: right;"><em>&#8212; Times Leader</em></p><style>
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Our view: Celebs key in changing drug culture