Wendy Penner, right, leads the Coalition forum on substance abuse prevention on Friday.

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The so-called "prevention parable" goes something like this: Imagine you were walking alongside a river and saw a bunch of people nearly drowning in the river. You and some other passersby jump in to help as many as you can, but soon it's too much to handle.

When you see one of the other passersby walking away, you yell out, "Where are you going?" And that person yells back, "To find out why everyone is falling in the river and to see if I can stop it."

That is part of a strategy called "looking upstream," and in the Berkshires right now, the analogy is being used to describe a way to tackle the region's substance abuse problem. In this case, said Wendy Pender, director of prevention and wellness at the Northern Berkshire Community Coalition, "upstream" is actually the children of today who we hope to prevent from becoming the addicts of tomorrow.

"Addiction is a pediatric disease," said Penner, speaking to around 80 people at the monthly Coalition forum on Friday.

Penner explained how a state grant that specifically studied underage drinking has sparked optimism about how that can help take a bite out of the heroin epidemic sweeping the nation.

"I feel really optimistic and encouraged that we can make a difference," she said.

First, the bad news, from various studies and the bi-annual Prevention Needs Assessment given to students in the region: Early alcohol use increases the likelihood of illicit drug use, and in the Berkshires more eighth-graders are more likely to have experimented with alcohol than the national average. Based on the 2015 Prevention Needs Assessment, 15 percent of eighth-graders have had alcohol at least once in the last 30 days. By 12th grade, that number jumps to 46 percent.

"It is the most widely abused in our society, and it is the most widely accessible to our youth," Penner said.

Those numbers are much higher than the percentages who have used marijuana and cigarettes, but even those numbers are still above the national average. In looking at why those local numbers are what they are, the various work groups Penner has led on this issue found that there are many risk factors, such as mental health issues and a low perception of harm. Then these groups focused on how to prevent young children from getting involved in these substances early on.

And that's the good news: "We can see there are places we can make a difference," she said. They developed a matrix to determine what are the most changeable of the barriers to prevention and created a plan based on the four they thought would be more easily able to be implemented.

First, there is an initiative to involve health-care providers, particularly local pediatricians, to target the "low perception of harm" concept. Retired pediatrician Thomas Hyde and practicing pediatricians Childsy Art and Marc McDermott attended Friday's forum to discuss changes they have made — most notably, starting the conversation with children as young as in third grade.

"Educating children from the time they're 9 years old ... hopefully will help them make the right decision at age 15," Hyde said.

Art admitted that she first was uneasy with the idea of talking to third-graders about substance abuse, but as age-appropriate brochures were created for the pediatricians to give to patients 9 and up it just became part of the packets of information handed to the patients and their parents.

"It's just routine," she said. "I know I'm doing it for everyone. It's really important to start talking about it early."

Next, there are programs in the schools to educate school-age children about substance abuse, something North Adams Superintendent of Schools James Montepare spoke briefly about.

"This is not taboo," he said. "This is something we should be talking about."

Along those lines, he hopes to get teachers of third-graders and up trained and to cultivate an atmosphere of community involvement, fun programs and camps, and more.

"Some of the statistics that are out there — depression and isolation, those are two huge risk factors," he said. "Socialization is a pill for some of those two issues."

Third is parent education, and Amber Besaw, the director of the Coalition's Family Place center, spoke about how she helps parents — some of who may be struggling with their own addiction issues — talk to their kids.

"We all need it," she said. "There's no manual when our kids were born on how to have these conversations."

And fourth is positive youth engagement, where Jess Sweeney of the coalition's Youth Leadership Programs said it is vital for the region to "leverage and celebrate the youth in our community."

And then there's us, the rest of the Northern Berkshire community, who can help make a difference. In fact, one of the biggest risk factors cited for underage substance abuse was that youths perceived that the adults didn't really think it was a big deal, either. In a conversation among the attendees of the forum, thoughts like "we did it as kids so it's hard to tell our kids not to" and "it's only alcohol, at least it's not heroin" were tossed around as reasons why youths are not getting consistent messages about the community's values around substance abuse.

Donna Motta, a North Adams resident who brings her two young homeschooled children to the coalition forums every month, said she had an older daughter with whom she went through some tough times and she had learned from those experiences, including how to avoid being judgmental and instead be honest.

"I messed up, here's how, here's what you can do," she recommended saying, with the idea that getting youths "physically, actively, verbally and vocally involved" in their own lives, family, futures and community holds the key.

Indeed, bringing all of these segments of society together to work toward preventing early substance abuse is such important work, said Mayor Richard Alcombright, who shared an "a ha moment" story.

Alcombright said he was cutting foam hearts out with some of the city's preschoolers and looking at the bright innocent young faces in front of him when "this rush came over me," he said.

"And I thought, which two of you? Which two of you will be addicted by the time you're 15?"

NbCC Assessment Forum Presentation

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