The Hangout with David Sciarretta
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The Hangout with David Sciarretta
#98: I Choose My Future: A Retired DEA Agent's Powerful Message
Rocky Herron, a retired DEA special agent with 31 years of experience, shares his journey delivering an impactful drug prevention program that has reached over 270,000 students across 16 countries. His mission emerged from discovering his own children weren't receiving drug prevention education in school.
• Free educational videos and resources are available at RockyHerron.com for schools and families looking to start these important conversations
Warning: this episode includes adult topics and mentions suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
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Welcome to the Hangout Podcast. I'm your host, david Shoretta. We have conversations with interesting and inspiring people on this show, and Rocky Heron certainly fits into both of those categories that I've been privileged to have with Rocky. Beginning in 2007, while still an active DEA agent, rocky began developing an intense drug prevention lecture for his own three children and their classmates. After he retired, he further developed and expanded upon this work and to date has presented and shared with over 270,000 students in the United States and in 16 countries. The program is called I Choose my Future or Yo Elijo Mi Futuro, and Rocky lectures in English and in Spanish, depending on the audience, and I can attest to the fact that it's an honest and emotional presentation that shows students, school staff and parents the realities of drug abuse today and how those realities impact the individual, the family, the school, the community, the country and the broader world in general. You can find more information about Rocky at RockyHerroncom. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Speaker 1:Welcome, rocky. Thank you so much for coming back and joining me today for a chat. Hi, dave, I'm very happy to be back with you. So I think it's been about a year. I was trying to go back and look. It's been about a year since we spoke the first time and that we've been in text, communication et cetera. But a lot's gone on in your life, in your work. Maybe you can first give us just a elevator pitch about what you do and then from there talk about what's happened in the last year and where things are headed in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I am a retired DEA special agent. I spent 31 years of my life chasing drug traffickers, mostly here in San Diego and the border with Tijuana, and six years down in South America. And in the middle of my career I discovered two things had happened. I discovered that my daughters weren't getting any organized drug prevention in school, which confused me as a parent because I just assumed it was happening. And then OxyContin hit San Diego. This is about 2008.
Speaker 2:And these beautiful kids I was arresting for dealing OxyContin were coming from our best schools and our best communities and our best families. They weren't your traditional drug dealing population. And on the way to jail, I'd asked these kids you know why'd you think it was okay to take a pill from a pharmacy, melt it and breathe in the vapor? And these kids all started crying and they said you know, rocky? No one warned me. And at some point I realized, my God, we're actually not warning our kids about what drugs will do to them.
Speaker 2:And so I came up with a teaching program just for my daughters and their classmates, never expecting it to go beyond that. And four years ago, by the end of my DEA career, it was almost everything I was doing and some people in DEA supported me. Others did not. But when I retired from DEA in 2021, the San Diego County Office of Education hired me and created a new position called the Ambassador of Alcohol and Other Drugs. So I spent half my year going into schools, clubs, churches, community groups anywhere in San Diego on behalf of the San Diego County Office of Education as their prevention ambassador, and the other half of my time I spend traveling.
Speaker 2:I'm teaching a bunch in Mexico now, as Mexico sadly becomes a drug consuming country as well. I'll be teaching in Thailand in December and I'm traveling around the US teaching, and I still remain baffled and confused and angry and sad why our country hasn't seen the need to do what I'm doing at a national level. You know I'm doing the best I can. I'm just one guy. I'm certainly believing there's people who can do it better than I can, but what I'm shocked at is that nobody at the national state or even the local level is seriously talking about why are we not getting in the front of every kid to warn them about what drugs will do to them in their lives? Seriously talking about why are we not getting in front of every kid to warn them?
Speaker 1:about what drugs will do to them in their lives. Why do you think that is? Why do you think there's this lack of a comprehensive and urgent approach?
Speaker 2:Well, I've heard opposition. I mean the people would to. I hear a lot of politicians saying parents need to talk to their kids and apparently those politicians don't live in the modern world where parents aren't engaging their kids. You as a school administrator have a challenge in getting parents to engage on anything At least that's my experience as I travel and parents don't know the truth about what drugs are today and they're not talking to their kids in a meaningful way. So school is really the only place I believe we can access the kids.
Speaker 2:I think some school administrators fear that if they have a drug prevention program coming in their school, they're somehow sending a message that they have a drug problem in their school. My belief on that is if you're running a school in modern America and you don't think you have a drug problem, you should probably go get another job, because this drug threat is everywhere. It's in every community, every demographic. And honestly I think sadly there remains a large stigma in the United States against the users, that too many people in modern America when they hear about somebody suffering from drugs, they in their mind just kind of unconsciously blame that user, and I understand that, that inclination. But I don't blame a 13 year old in America today for not understanding what drugs and alcohol will do to them, and my job is to teach as many of those little kids the truth.
Speaker 1:You know before they make the choices to change who they are. Do you think the punitive approach or the punitive orientation that kind of get tough on drugs philosophy in schools, do you think that has a chilling effect on parents' willingness and openness to talk to kids about these issues? Like to give you a concrete example from my daily experience. So many of the instances that we run into where a child is involved with a substance, the parents immediately get defensive. They either say someone else gave it to them or I don't come from a family like that, or you, this isn't. This didn't, actually didn't happen. My kid's not talking to you anymore. In other words, it's oppositional rather than not talking to you anymore. In other words, it's oppositional rather than thinking about a child with a brain that's not going to be fully developed for another 10 to 15 years and the need to really educate and listen to them.
Speaker 2:No, I think that I think what you just described is happening all across society, where we don't hold ourselves accountable, we don't hold our children accountable in the way we used to. But my work is a little different. That specific instance where a kid has been found to be using, or suspected of using, that kid's getting some directed interventions. My work is directed at all the other kids who aren't getting on the radar, who may be using, maybe aren't using, or live in an environment where everybody around them seems to be using and we're not giving them the information they need to to make their own, their own choices. So it's, it's my, my work in my mind is true, you know, true, primary prevention. I want to, and I I view my audiences of kids as as having three components. You know I've been to your school many times over the years. I can't count how many times now I've been in. I'm very grateful for that. But when I have 200 of your kids in the assembly room here, in my mind, 20 of those kids are goody two-shoes, right that they, for whatever reason they may, have already made a choice that they're never going to go down this road. I made that choice when I was a kid, for whatever reason, and I think 20% of the kids are never going to listen to anything. Oh, I'm sorry, I think 10% of the kids, 10% of the kids are the goody two-shoes and 10% of the kids are the I'm going to have to learn the hard way. They're just not going to listen to anything that somebody says. So you get the bell curve Right, right. Their environment is just so inundated with drugs. They've invested in the culture that supports drug use. So, 10%, I'm not really worried about reaching 10% I'm not going to reach. My mission is to reach those 80% and again, these are my numbers, but the 80% in the middle who I believe are persuadable right, they're persuadable and maybe I can pull them back. And I take these opportunities to reach your kids and every school's kids extremely seriously because I believe in that school year. My 60 to 90 minute pushback is the only really strong, directed message they're going to get in a year where the popular culture and the world around them and social media and their friends is pushing them to use drugs, to see drugs as beneficial and positive to them, and that's why I bring such intensity to my sessions, because in my mind, that's my one shot to give these kids something to support them not making the mistake that so many other people have made.
Speaker 2:And a second assessment I do of your kids in every school as well, is I want to reach the kids who've never started using drugs right. I want them to stick with that, reduce initiation of drug usage. The kids in your population who are dabbling or using drugs and alcohol chronically already. I want them to reconsider, pull back and definitely go no further. And I doubt that many of the kids who are using weed currently, who hear my presentations, will stop using weed. I'd like to think maybe some will, but I'd like to believe that some of them may never move on to fentanyl or meth or some of these other more hideous drugs, and if that's the case, that would be a win for me as well.
Speaker 2:And then there's a third population of kids, the ones who suffer as collateral damage, and you've witnessed this After every assembly I do in your sixth grade, seventh grade and then eighth grade class groupings. Kids line up to come, cry to me, to get a hug from me, to share with me terrible trauma that they're living from drug and alcohol use around them, and I get a moment to look at those kids in the eye and say it's not your fault. You honor me for sharing this and I hope you'll talk to somebody else about this so you can work through this and it doesn't have to be your future.
Speaker 1:I witnessed that and have witnessed that on multiple occasions and it's probably the most powerful thing I've seen as the outcome of an assembly or presentation in a long time To get especially middle school kids. They're not going to line up just because you happen to be the cool person who just did a presentation. They're only going to line up and come and want to meet you and give you a hug or shake your hand if you touch something inside of them, and I see it on LinkedIn and your videos that you post and everything. This is a universal reaction. It's not just our kids here, our kids here.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, you and I, before hitting record, we're talking about some of the resistance you face kind of in the, in the, in the industry or in in education in general. Um, uh, because of the this model, right, the assembly based kind. I don't know if it gets a bad rap from the old days of DARE, the DARE kind of back in the day, which I guess there was some data that showed that that actually might have increased usage. I don't know if that's really true, but that was kind of the word on the street was like ah, if you do, dare was shown to be not effective, and so it was kind of totally scrapped. Where do you think the resistance comes from?
Speaker 2:Well, no, dare was rejected after 15 or 20 years and social scientists attempted to study it and they concluded that they couldn't prove it worked. Ergo, it didn't work. And then they made some suggestions that maybe it increased drug usage, which I think is absurd.
Speaker 2:I really challenge that that it increased drug usage. Do you think it was just really hard to measure that it increased drug usage? Do you think it was just really hard to measure? Well, I think, yes. I think we have gotten to a place in American society where we believe we can measure things that aren't measurable. But I'm not defending DARE, right. But I've met many adults over the years who've come to me and said DARE did work for them. Okay, right, they told me it did work for them. I think DARE was maybe a little too bland. I think things designed by committee often end up being too bland and I've been free for 18 years to teach what I want to teach.
Speaker 2:You're a committee of one, I'm a committee of one and I'm prepared to crash and burn after every assembly if somebody disagrees with what I taught. But no, I think when DARE was discredited it somehow created this bizarre shift in our society that we began to believe that all prevention education doesn't work and what should have happened when dare was discredited was just okay, well, let's try something else. But we didn't do that. So when you look at how horrible the drug situation is today 10 times worse than literally 10 times worse than what is when I started in dea over the last 20 years we have not done anything to get back in front of our kids to warn them. Ea.
Speaker 2:Over the last 20 years we have not done anything to get back in front of our kids to warn them, and that's incomprehensible to me. It's a sin. It's a sin All the billions we're spending trying to deal with the death and the homelessness and all these things directly connected to drug abuse and we're spending literally nothing meaningful I'm not saying nothing's happening, but nothing meaningful or intentional is happening nationwide to go back to teaching our kids. And we have an example. So in 1960, I saw some surveys that said roughly half of American teenagers smoked occasionally or regularly Cigarettes. Cigarettes, yeah, 1960. I don't know if that's good or bad. I just found this old data, but it doesn't shock me. I mean, cigarette smoking was certainly On 60 Minutes.
Speaker 1:they'd be smoking during the interview. Right, the doctors in the doctor's lab would be smoking.
Speaker 2:So. But in 1964, some people said, no, we're going to fight back. And that's when they initiated this massive national campaign. They put the labels on the cigarettes and we began to teach part of that program. We were taught every year in school the truth of what cigarettes will do to you. And it took a long time maybe 30 years that we got to a place where kids they don't want cigarettes. And I'll ask the kids in my audiences, raise your. I literally say raise your hands if you think cigarettes are gross and disgusting. Every hand goes up. Now we are almost completely eradicated youth cigarette smoking. And then the tobacco companies did a terrible end, run around us and created the vapes and now we have this hideous usual vaping problem Right.
Speaker 2:But nevertheless, I think if you had told the average American in 1960, we're going to start an education campaign to get kids to stop smoking, I think the average American would have said, ah, that's never going to happen, that's just what kids do. And I think that's sort of the same mentality that Americans have today when it comes to alcohol and weed and other drug use. So I just kids are going to do that. There's nothing you can do about it, and I don't agree with that. You don't agree with it. The schools that use me all over the country and around the world don't agree with that.
Speaker 2:But there is an obstacle at a societal level that I call the prevention industrial complex, and everyone talks about the military industrial complex being a big problem for society. I, for me, I call it the prevention industrial complex and what it is to me is that we have gatekeepers at the state, local, national levels that control funding for drug prevention and access for drug prevention, and my experience with them rejecting my work is that they totally believe that assembly-based education is useless, doesn't do any good, doesn't work, and I asked them to define what that means. And I asked them to define what would working mean to you. You say it doesn't work. What would working mean? Because every single child that leaves my assemblies at Albert Einstein is better informed than they were before my assembly.
Speaker 2:Isn't that a form of working, giving them information, informed than they were before my assembly? Isn't that a form of working, giving them information? Is it going to stop every kid from using drugs? Of course not. That's absurd. But I encountered this opposition everywhere I go and, in my opinion, these people I believe they're well-intentioned, but there's an old expression don't destroy the good in the search for the perfect. And at a time where I have to claw and fight and struggle to get an hour or 90 minutes in a school year to access the kids with this message, the argument that that hour is not enough and we should only do 12-hour sessions or something that's kind of meaningless, because we're not close to that and I do wish to be put out of a job.
Speaker 2:I pray, I pray that our government steps up and goes you know what Our kids need? This we're going to give it to them. Yeah, we're going to we're schools. You get now six or 12 or 20 funded hours a year. This is the program we're going to give you and I will ride off in the sunset, but the reality for me, where I go, is that's not happening and those kids, the only messenger they're getting in the entire year is me messenger they're getting in the entire year is me.
Speaker 1:Now you do a lot of work internationally, and how is the acceptance or the welcoming of your work different?
Speaker 2:Well, internationally the DEA has a reputation from Hollywood. It's a little bit with kids here in the US, but definitely overseas in Mexico, colombia. They've only heard about DEA in the movies. Vin Diesel and John Travolta are rarely they've seen as DEA agents. So that definitely works for me. They think I'm James Bond. I stand up in front of a group of high school kids in Mexico and they say I'm a DEA guy. The kid's like, oh, and they think I'm some super spy guy, which I'm not. But I let them believe that.
Speaker 2:But whether I'm speaking domestically or internationally, my 30-year career of chasing drug traffickers and living the fight and seeing what it does to people absolutely makes a difference. The kids are willing to listen to me in a way that they're not willing to listen to many other people with the same exact teaching message. In my opinion, what I teach to the kids is not rocket science. I teach a little bit about brain development. I teach what addiction does and maternal drug usage does and collateral damage to kids. And these things I actually teach the kids are not, in my mind, revolutionary. It's that the kids are willing to listen and give these ideas more space in their minds because of what I represent and the credibility I bring to DEA. But I'm very proud of what I teach, because when I started teaching internationally, I was told, and I believed, that I would have to be careful to make culturally appropriate changes to teach. And the reality, dave, I've taught now in 16 countries. I don't change anything. I teach. I don't change a thing. Sometimes I'm teaching through translators. I'm fluent in Spanish. I'll teach directly in Spanish-speaking countries, but I've yet to fail to reach an audience anywhere in the world, because what I'm teaching is universal. Right. The drugs that are being used in Ghana may be different than the drugs are being used by your students and their families in San Diego. What's not different is the outcome and the pain, and that's what I'm connecting with. And it's interesting A lot of our efforts right now are talking about what's being used Fentanyl, fentanyl, fentanyl.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of cocaine being used, a lot of meth being used, a lot of alcohol being used, a lot of weed being used, and we're only kind of focused on fentanyl right now. But that will change. I mean, I've been in this long enough. I was involved in San Diego before OxyContin got here, and then it was Vicodin and Percocet abuse, and then Oxycontin came in, and then it was Oxycontin abuse, and then that led to heroin abuse, and then the heroin abuse led to fentanyl abuse. And now, unfortunately, there are even worse chemicals coming in in the wake of fentanyl Carfentanil, which is a hundred times stronger. The nitazines, which are a completely different class of drugs that act like fentanyl they're 10 times stronger. So the what that our population, the what that's being used, is always going to change.
Speaker 2:I'm going after why.
Speaker 2:I am trying to get the kids in my audience just to ask themselves why would I do this to myself, why would I let my friends do this to themselves, when the cost and the risk is so high? And that's this very reasonable argument I'm saying why would you do this to yourself? And I tell the kids my whole program is based on the theory of self-determination theory in psychology, which is a theory of the intrinsic motivation of every human, defined happiness. And there's three main components Autonomy right each individual is an agent and I tell the kids I choose my future, you're gonna choose your future, you are the architect of your life, you decide who you become.
Speaker 2:And Number two, competence I teach the kids the truth about what drugs and alcohol would do to them, based on my own 35 years in this. And then the third is relatedness, and I believe I'm very, very successful at teaching my message in a way that the kids are able to hear, and I'm constantly upgrading and changing my messaging to make sure that I'm teaching in a way that the kids are able to hear we were talking about the fact that when you ask kids in Mexico who is responsible, who are the consumers and where you know where's the money come for this, these, the drug trade they give you one answer and then the U?
Speaker 1:S there's like just blank faces. Can you talk about that dynamic?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So one of the things that one of the main components of my message is that even the act of buying drugs causes harm. You, even buying drugs causes harm because the local drug dealer you bought that from didn't make that drug. They're going to take your a hundred bucks and they're going to buy it more from their drug dealer and she's going to buy it from her drug dealer and very quickly. In a modern America. That money's in the hands of the cartels using it to hurt people in America and definitely in Mexico and other countries.
Speaker 2:And I talk about the extreme levels of violence in Mexico. And as part of that message, I'll ask my audiences in the United States who's paying for all the drug violence in Mexico? And I get a lot of blank stares and eventually some kid will go to cartels and I said no, because we're the ones buying the drugs. All that money flooding into Mexico that funds the cartels starts in the pockets of American drug users. When I'm in Mexico, I started asking the question of those Mexican high school and college audiences and I asked them who's responsible for paying for all the drug violence in Mexico? In your country? They instantly go those consum. Are those gringos the American drug user. They don't have to think about it, and that's deeply frustrating to me. And I'm not absolving Mexico and China, for you know they need to do a lot more to fix what's going on.
Speaker 2:But how do we ever resolve this problem if we're not willing to be honest? That it starts with Americans wanting to spend so much money, and the Rand Corporation, a very legitimate research entity, did a study several years ago and they estimated that Americans spend roughly $150 billion a year buying drugs. And, assuming those numbers are accurate, let's assume a third of that goes to the Mexican cartels, because all the cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl flooding into America today comes through those Mexican cartels. So let's say, 50 billion of that goes to those Mexican cartels in the form of cash.
Speaker 2:The Mexican military has a budget of $15 billion, so we're sending we American drug buyers are funding these criminal organizations who don't respect the law, they don't respect human rights, they don't respect anybody at a rate three times greater than the Mexican military is being funded to fight back, and that's just a very unfair fight. So I don't have quick solutions to any of it. My mission is actually very narrow. I talk about these other things, but my mission is to get as many kids as I can to sit down for an hour or 90 minutes and rethink their own willingness to poison themselves and their friends.
Speaker 1:You're well over 200,000 students, 270 now 270. And you're going as high as you can. Huh, you're going to get. I mean, they're really as you say, you're trying to work your way out of a job.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, but, but yes, I am. I do pray that society eventually will catch up. There are some things happening that give me some hope right now, like people are finally coming around to like maybe we ought to try more of this. Like what do you have any? So I've gotten some calls. I've gotten some calls from national level people, uh, from different organizations, some federal agencies and some other outside organizations that work at the national level who've shown interest in talking to me, and I don't know how they've heard about me, but they're aware of what I'm trying to do and they're interested in finding out more about it, which I find very hopeful. But I don't have my hope up.
Speaker 2:About a year just, I was fighting the world. I was so angry and and seeing all the sadness and suffering, you know, just just leaving your school. Last time I was at your school, I had I maybe it was your seventh graders, but I had this mass of like 20 or 30 kids come up and sharing all this pain, with these beautiful kids crying and I call it vomiting their trauma all over me. You know, and I welcome it, yeah, but I leave the school with this. Just, I have to cleanse myself, you know, spiritually it's just terrible and I want to have more for those kids and I was carrying that home and it was impacting my psychology and my emotional energy for my family and friends and I said I've decided I can't do that, you know. So I'm not trying to save the world now, right.
Speaker 2:And uh when a kid tells me some terrible pain. And when a kid tells me some terrible pain, I work very hard to give that kid. In the moment I have with them some hope and some inspiration and I leave the school feeling well, at least I made that kid feel safe. At least I made that kid feel safe for a moment and maybe that little window of sharing with me will lead to them sharing with somebody else. But I now am not trying to save the world. I'm not trying to change America, which I was as an insane man. Now it's just I'm going to give every group in front of me the best service I have and I don't say no to any invitation. I'll talk to 10 kids or 2,000 kids. I just say yes to everything. It takes me the same effort to talk to 10 as it does to 2,000. I wish I could do 2,000 a lot, but I never know which kid in which audience is actually going to take the message away.
Speaker 2:And I've had some interesting experiences in the last few months where I get the kids who come up to me right after the assembly, which is beautiful, but that's easy. I'm standing there. I now I'm getting emails and text messages from kids days after I left, who tracked me down on the internet because I don't give out my contact info. They track me down and they send me messages literally saying you changed my life, you changed my life, you changed my life. And many of them tell me that they were in drug usage or they come from drug usage and they just didn't. No one had ever told them hey, this doesn't have to be your future. This world you're in right now. I can't change that. I tell the kids this I'm sorry If you're in a world where everybody around you is drunk or alcoholic or smoking weed. I can't fix that. All I can point out is you have one life, you're the architect of it and you may have to find a way to work your way out of that.
Speaker 2:Alcohol we're not talking about alcohol at all and so fatal drug overdose in the US dropped, thank God, from somewhere over 110,000 a year to just under 90,000 last year. Dramatic drop in overdoses. No one can conclusively say why that is. Speculation leans heavily on. We've done a really good job of pushing Narcan out into society, so that's a good thing, right? If less people are dying, that's awesome. But less people dying doesn't mean less people are using. We don't know. And in fact, when I talk about overdoses in my teaching, I don't distinguish between a fatal or non-fatal overdose, because in my mind, whether God or Narcan are both saved that poor person suffering the overdose, or the drug poisoning, as we call it too.
Speaker 2:I'm fighting the act of self-poisoning that led to the overdose, and I fear that the level of self-poisoning hasn't dropped one bit. I don't have any indication that less people are actually using fentanyl and using these other terrible drugs, and I think we over-focus on overdose death as a metric and we do not focus on that collateral damage in the kids that I see everywhere I go. That is my prime motivation now, and I've had probably more than a thousand children now well, over a thousand now come up to me after my assemblies to vomit their trauma on me and to get a hug. And let me tell them it's not their fault. And I take selfies with many of those kids and my phone is just full of selfies. These kids, I can't bear to erase them. You know these tragic little kids who trusted me for a moment. But it's why you know, it's why you bring me into your school, and even in San Diego, teaching here 18 years and now I work for the County Office of Education. But most school districts still don't use me. And I'm free, it's free. People elsewhere are paying me, you know, decent money to travel and do this. And in San Diego it's free and it's still hard to get in schools and they this. And in San Diego it's free and it's still hard to get in schools.
Speaker 2:And there's Santee. I want to, I want to call, shout out to Santee. The Santee school district is a K to eight, a medium sized district. They don't have that many schools, but they have decided and they told me the board. The school board told me they're going to bring me in every year as long as I want to come. So so far I've gone in twice now. But there are S Santee and some other schools in the county that bring me in every year to talk to their sixth, seventh and eighth graders. And some educators say well, the kids already heard you, so why would they want to hear you again? Well, in actuality, when I show up back at your school, oh hey, Rocky, the kids, they know why I'm here.
Speaker 1:It's almost like I'm now an adjunct counselor at your school and a lot happens in a year in a kid's life.
Speaker 2:But the kids get that this assembly is going to be interesting, so I don't have to fight to get them to listen. They understand why they're there. Right, and I address it by telling the kids look how many of you were here last year. All the hands go up, okay, cool. Some of what I'm going to share is the same. There's always new stuff. However, something today is really different, and it's you. You are a year older, you're a year more mature, you're going to hear and see this differently, and the kids go okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know part of my success as well with the little kids sixth, seventh and eighth graders, and some districts have me down to fifth grade because they're seeing the drug behavior move down to fifth grade now Is I address the mental unwellness in our kids and the line I use is look, I'm 58 years old, I got two college degrees, I did some high end stuff in my life and yet I look at the world around us right now and it confuses me. I don't get it. What's going on with our politics, our economy? We have these wars? And if I I tell the kids, if I, with all my life experience, can't explain what's going on around me, they're like yeah, mister, yeah, you get it. And then I say and we're failing you and this is my belief we are failing our kids as a nation. You're not, you're doing what you can, but as a nation we're failing our kids by not giving them basic warnings about this threat that's everywhere, that they deserve to have, fully recognizing that many of the kids are still going to engage in the same behavior. I know that. But don't we have a moral obligation as a society to warn them?
Speaker 2:And I'll make it a local example, so the numbers might be slightly off, but four years ago in San Diego we had, I think, 16 fatal overdoses of kids under 18 years old. That is fantastically unacceptable. More than one a month under 18 years old was dying from overdose. Three years ago. I think it was six or seven, two years ago it was three and last year was zero. As far as I know, there were no fatal overdoses of kids under 18 in San Diego. I'm not taking any credit for that, but I'm very proud that there are a lot of efforts in San Diego to educate the public and educate kids.
Speaker 2:But if we had a situation where and this is a rough example to use, but if we had, unfortunately, a serial killer that was stalking one student a month in San Diego, oh there'd be mass hysteria. Well, there'd be hysteria about it. And if we had any notion we had a security film or something we had any notion what this person looked like and what they drove, how long would it take to do a full stop in every school and warn every kid? It would happen the next day. And with fentanyl that's waiting for every single child, anyone listening to this? If you have children, if you're running a school or you're a parent or a grandparent, fentanyl is waiting for your kids at every prom, every beach bonfire, every house party that they go to. Potentially, fentanyl is there. It's flooded across our society. The pills cost just a couple dollars for the kids that want them and we are again failing in a major way to make sure they understand and get those warnings every year they understand and get those warnings every year.
Speaker 1:Well, I know you're not. I know you've recalibrated from trying to save America to one kid at a time and that's probably the appropriate recalibration. But I am hopeful that your contacts and conversations that you are having, and hopefully continue to have them, at the national level, are representing a real shift. I I do see at least some lip service made to even look and this is going to get me in hot water politically, but that's okay uh, healthier diets, for example, for americans, a recalibration around um, taking a look at the influence that drug companies have in our lives.
Speaker 1:You and I talked about that the last time. There's a pill for everything. There's a pill to start things, the pill to stop the thing that you started with the first pill, and on and on and on, and so maybe this is representing some sort of a shift nationally, because I see these as real kind of manifestations of despair. I have no way to measure that, but when we talk about the confusion that you have, that you and I have as past middle-aged in life and somewhat accomplished in the things we've done and we're still like what the hell is going on, put that on a 14-year-old kid in a society that's fragmented. People working three jobs can't afford to make a living. All those things.
Speaker 2:Right. But in that same little part of my presentation I'll say look, none of us can make sense of the world, and yet we expect you to. But what we adults do? Now we step back and scratch our heads and ask ourselves why are so many of our kids self-destructing and making really bad decisions? Bad choices and it's my belief because they don't have a vision for themselves. And so when I teach adults, I don't teach this to kids, but when I teach adults, I argue that we're in a big drug crisis, not a fentanyl crisis. Fentanyl is an important part of a much bigger drug crisis. But why do we have a drug crisis?
Speaker 2:As you touched on, we are one of the two countries in the Western world that allows that direct to consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals and I used to teach at length on this and it's a multi-billion dollar industry to sell medicines to us directly. And it's all day, every day. It's a steady diet and it's been around the last 25 years that this happened. So any young person in America who's grown up in the last 25 years has been fed a steady diet of advertising and conditioning to believe that there's a chemical, pharmaceutical chemical that's going to solve their problems. And the popular culture is telling them that there's a weed and alcohol and other stuff that's going to solve their problems and we're not pushing back on that.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, I'd like to believe that the country is kind of waking up and getting back to its roots. But what I teach is so fundamentally simple and I'm very proud of the demographics that I've been able to access and in my mind the pictures don't lie. So the people who intellectually oppose what I do or have these stigmas when I show them the pictures of this joyful engagement with audiences that don't look engageable by me? I don't know, I don't know engageable by me? I don't know. I don't know what they think, but I am as white as you get old, bald white, and I make that joke.
Speaker 1:At the start of my presentations I show a picture of myself as a young DEA guy with long hair a red beard.
Speaker 2:I go who is that? And I get a thousand stares. The kids are like no, is that you? And? And they all start laughing. And some kids will go I've been catfished. But I tell the kids, look, I don't put that out there, don't get a laugh. I miss the hair. I say, but I don't put this there to feel sad about getting old. What I say is I know that when I stand in front of an audience of kids, some of them look at me and they see an old, bald white man and they turn their ears off and they say I'm not going to listen to this. Why would I listen to this guy? And I look at him. When I say and dude, I get the guiltiest looks. The kids start laughing. They get these little smiles Cause like, oh, it got me. Cause a whole bunch of them are like oh, my God, I do not want to listen to this guy. And I say, but that's okay, but I think you're going to find this. You. I'm not from here, I don't look like you, but from that young age at 23 to this old man age, I've spent my life seeing the harm that comes to beautiful people just like you, and it's incredible. They're just like okay. And so recently I've had success in two audiences that are just to me, wonderful.
Speaker 2:I was invited to teach in a prison in Mexico last July and the World Boxing Council is a major boxing organization that supports my work and they got this opportunity for me to teach inside of a prison in Mexico Wow, and I don't often get scared. But the night before it's just outside Mexico City. The night before I was nervous. I didn't sleep well, a little bit worried about my safety. I wasn't going in with any bodyguards and this was the hardcore prison and I don't think there's any other retired white DEA agents that have walked into a Mexican prison to sit down and talk to 150 men. But I was much more worried about how am I going to engage these men, recognizing that my audience is going to be 150 men in prison in Mexico who have been conditioned by life from infancy to hate what I look like and hate what I represent as an American cop infancy to hate what I look like and hate what I represent as an American cop. How am I going to connect with them? But I went in and I start with humor and I shook every man's hand Before we started, I went around, shook 150 hands and they didn't know who I was and some didn't want to shake my hand but they did.
Speaker 2:And then, when I stood up and was introduced by the warden as a DEA agent, there's this uncomfortable looks and I said hey, in Spanish, how many of you guys have a friend in the DEA? And it was hilarious. They're all like tucking their hands under their, like not me, like that's the most outrageous question you could ever ask them. And I said no, no, no, from now on, you all have a friend in DEA, right? And they all start laughing. They just think that's funny.
Speaker 2:And then I said but let's get real. I said I know that many of you were severely damaged when you were infants and children by drug and alcohol abuse around you. And they're looking at me like where's this going? And I said okay, raise your hand if you have kids. The vast majority hands up. Okay, hands down. I said how many of you want to inflict on your children the same pain that was inflicted on you? And I saw a bunch of jaws dropping like oh, the old gringo just got real here. But when I finished it was incredible.
Speaker 2:So I was searched when I was going you can't take cell phones in sure to mexican prison, but I was bringing in my computer bag and I I took a risk to stick my cell phone in there just in case I want I could get a picture. And after my presentation, the reaction from the prisoners was ridiculous. This one kid with gang tats on his face had been like mad dogging me my whole presentation, and I noticed it. When a kid, when you're in his prison, yeah, and the gangster is mad dogging you, you notice, he knows, yeah. So when I finished, though, he came up. This sweet 25 year old kid came up like a sweet 25 year old kid and goes my tomo's himself you take a selfie with me and invited one of his buddies.
Speaker 2:So if I have this incredible selfie with this smiling, hardcore Mexican gangster. So I captured some of those pictures, and next week, next Monday, I'll be teaching in the youth prison here in San Diego, and those kids are going to hate me when I show up, but I'm going to show these pictures and say I know how you guys are all bad-ass. Are you more bad-ass than these guys? Because these guys got some value from, apparently, from listening to me, you know. I'm hoping you guys listen. So that's. I'm really excited about being able to access our youth incarcerated population because they are extreme risk when they get out. And then just last week I was on the reservation in Utah and the week before that I was on the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations teaching tribal kids, and it is very, very difficult for someone who looks like me to get access to those kids.
Speaker 1:I did see in a flyer you shared that I think in one of those you partnered with one of the tribal elders. Is there a different? I mean you said you don't change your message. Right, your message is accepted everywhere. Is there an element, is there a shift that has to happen in tribal lands? Like the guy who you partnered with it said that he had brought in spirituality into his whole thing. Is that melded with what you do? Or that was kind of he helped you get in the door.
Speaker 2:So I have done. I've worked with some tribal populations successfully without my friend Les Les left hand Okay.
Speaker 2:But Les and I met last year when I was in Montana and his whole life's been devoted to helping youth and he believed my message was one that would engage the tribal kids. So he got access for me to the schools in the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne reservations and I said I want to do this with you. So we partnered for the first time no real planning around it, just let's go talk. And he has worked with kids and groups and as individuals. He has never done, you know, school-based prevention right. So I was just letting him kind of spread his own wings and we did five presentations in one day on the northern Cheyenne Reservation and every presentation he was refining his message and they would three the next day on the crow and at the end of the second day his message was dramatically improved.
Speaker 2:He was able to watch the reactions of the kids. But he did bring his spirituality and I would never do this, I would never say I'm going to start my presentation with a prayer. Right, he did. And the kids some prayed in their native beliefs, some prayed Christian. It was beautiful to watch this and of course he was very authentically able to say I know the pain, you're growing up in, and this is something amazing too.
Speaker 2:So we were in a town called Lame Deer on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and Montana has the highest drunk driving rate in the nation. I didn't know that and it's much, much worse on the reservations and my friend Les asked the kids what's the worst drug in your communities? Alcohol, in these communities it's alcohol. Sure, they're seeing their relatives die from cirrhosis. They're seeing the domestic violence. And I'm looking at this and in my regular presentations, like when I'm at your school, I have occasionally asked your students hey, raise your hand if you are suffering right now from someone else's drug and alcohol abuse, and I'll get you know. 10% of the kids, 20% of the kids. It's amazing how many kids will put up their hands and say, yeah, I'm hurting because somebody around me is hurting themselves. I decided to flip it based on what I know about the tribal realities. So I asked these kids in my first lame deer presentation raise your hand. If you have not, if you have not been hurt by drug and alcohol abuse, raise your hand, no hands.
Speaker 2:No hands I asked it over the course of two days. I asked that of 800 tribal kids, you want to guess how many raised their hands? No hands, three, three, three. And I drove away thinking this is freaking, unacceptable. America in 2025 and this mass of children being badly wounded by this, and we're not even trying. I mean, you know there are many people trying, so I gotta be careful what I say, right? But when I say we're not trying, like intentionally over time teaching these kids, you matter to us and this world you're living in, we can't fix that. We can't fix what you've grown up around. What we can change is how you view yourself. We want to tell you you matter to us and we're here to support you building life that you want.
Speaker 1:Can you talk a little bit about the Narcan effect or the risk of Narcan? I want to be really careful about what we say. Let me, before you answer this, just let me kind of give you my experience. So we've been very fortunate to have you come in multiple times to have a conversation and presentation to our kids, and that's going to continue as long as you keep doing this work and you want to come, come meet with generations of kids here. But my experience is something will come out and there'll be like an assembly bill, such and such and every school has to have Narcan, and so then Narcan is provided for free, and then there's a video training that you got to go through and you have to store them in these places on campus and send out this notice to your community.
Speaker 1:And as that's going on, most people are thinking this is going to be for someone else's kid or it's going to be for a homeless person on the street who comes stumbling up to the campus and we somehow have to administer this thing in front of the campus and within a week or two we forget that that even was a conversation and we move on. We don't go to where you go, which is the educational piece. But when you see how these, how Narcan, can really dramatically reverse overdose, as soon as you and full disclosure you showed me some pretty graphic footage of what happens when someone overdoses on on, uh, how quickly, how quickly. Right within 30 seconds or so they go from sitting to they're in a prone position and they're nearly dead and the narcan reverses it pretty. At least the person starts moving. I'm sure there's other damage that's happened. Is there a risk that we're seeing Narcan as the solution here?
Speaker 2:Right? No, I, yes, I do believe there's a huge risk at that and, as I said earlier, you know it's the act of consuming the poison that concerns me and I love that Narcan is saving lives. But there's multiple problems that I have with how Narcan has been marketed. We fought for years I was part of the effort in San Diego to get schools to allow it on school. Incredibly, there was huge resistance. It's a very benign, over-the-counter thing. It's been proven. If you're not using opioids it has no effect on you at all.
Speaker 2:We could drink it and it's not going to have any impact literally.
Speaker 2:But we finally got it into schools. Well, that's great, but what I realized is that a lot of the school administrators, who finally were forced or agreed to put it in the school, decided that they had addressed the drug problem. And in their mind, if you say, what are you doing about drugs? Well, we got Narcan in the school, as if that's a drug prevention policy, and for me, narcan is as important as, and no better than, having a fire extinguisher on the wall. Nobody running the school systems would say having fire extinguishers in the schools is a fire prevention policy. And in fact, you are still mandated by the state of California to have multiple fire drills a year, I believe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, every month.
Speaker 2:In living memory. We don't know kids have been hurt. Last time a kid was hurt in a school fire.
Speaker 1:With fentanyl and drugs.
Speaker 2:It's completely optional, it's not funded and in fact there's a ton of opposition to people like me coming in saying, hey, kids, you know, beware so getting Narcan in the schools, you may have closed off opportunities to do what I do because the administrator is like no, we addressed it. We addressed the problem by putting Narcan on the wall, which is good. Something else I worry about, two things I worry about Young people have told me the people who like to use drugs they'll talk to me. It's funny, people don't understand this. People who use drugs are very happy talking to me, justifying what they do, explaining what they do, explaining how I'm wrong. I'll talk to anybody and I've been told multiple times by young people that they consider Narcan to be quote designated driver.
Speaker 2:And when the people in the drug-using community have it, they feel safer. They're all aware of fentanyl. They feel safer consuming fentanyl. They feel safer. They're all aware of fentanyl. They feel safer consuming fentanyl and they'll pick one of their friends to sit there with Narcan in case somebody in the group has an overdose. They don't seem to understand that fentanyl is so powerful. It might take five, six, seven, eight doses of Narcan just to keep one person alive long enough. Because Narcan, when it gets in the person's body, will kick the opioids off the brain receptors and reactivate the breathing, but it doesn't destroy those opioid molecules so they'll come back in. So as the Narcan wears off, then the opioid molecules will go back on the brain. So people can have this cyclical overdosing pattern until the first responders get there.
Speaker 1:So if they're all sharing that same Well, one may not be enough for anybody, right, but it's just.
Speaker 2:I think when we're distributing it we need to be very careful about its limitations and make people understand. You know, look, this is not a guarantee for even one person, never mind multiples. Second, and this is all hypothetical in my mind, but when I do parent events, which I stopped for a while because parents don't show up, I started doing them again to honor schools that let me have access to the kids. So you know, if you asked me to come and do a parent event, I would say yes, fully recognizing that the population of your parents that will show up will be 2% if we're lucky. But when I do the parent events and those few parents show up, some show up because they're just pathologically supportive of the schools. They'll just show up to anything the school does. Other parents show up, I believe, because they're concerned, like they're worried about something in their own family. That's what motivates them to, like they're noticing changes in the behavior of their kids or they found some drug paraphernalia in their kids. So they show up.
Speaker 2:And I have been at events where Narcan has been handed out to the audience, and these are Narcan distribution events. Narcan has been handed out to the audience and these are Narcan distribution events. And I've yet to hear the people distributing the Narcan to point out that most of the kids who consume drugs are doing it locked in the bathroom, locked in the bedroom, they're in their car, they're not likely to use it in front of their parents, right, the odds of the parents being present and aware when the kid is overdosing are really low. It's still good I want the families to have air, but I fear that it's all hypothetical.
Speaker 2:But I do fear that some families who come to these events because they're concerned about drug use in their own families will come away with Narcan with an exaggerated sense that they've addressed the problem and they may, because they're ashamed and because they're in pain and because they're conflicted and confused. They may not go on to seek more meaningful help for their child in the mistaken belief that with the Narcan they're going to protect their child. If that makes sense, it does make sense. It's completely hypothetical. But I just wish that the people pushing the Narcan would say look, it's fantastic, I can get ED. You know the automatic defibrillator, it might help.
Speaker 1:it might not Just thinking that it's just.
Speaker 2:Hey, it's a good tool to have it, but, god, we got to do a lot more. We got to do a lot more, and I'm not hearing that.
Speaker 1:We got to do a lot more, it'll be like someone saying what's your plan for heart health? And you go it's good, we got the AED thing here.
Speaker 2:We decades of healthy eating and exercise, meditation, whatever right, yeah, you know, instead of just the zapper, the paddles. Yeah, and you know, and, and we have become a society that with no attention span, and we want quick fixes. And you know, oxycontin was licensed in 1996, late 95, early 96, and it's taken, and oxycontin is the reason we are we're here today. We did not have widespread opioid abuse across our population 30 years ago, but we do now and tragically, it might take us 30 years.
Speaker 2:I hope not, but it might take us 30 years to work our way out, just like with cigarettes. It took a long time, seatbelts, cigarettes. But if we don't start working my right, my thing if we don't start working hard today, we're going to be very sad in a year or two. And, of course, I've been saying that nowadays for 18 years. I have amazing prediction powers that if we don't start warning our population away from it, more and more of them are going to continue to offer themselves up to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it took what 20 years for the Sackler family to get held kind of accountable for you know whatever accountable means for billionaires.
Speaker 2:But you know, and it's well and we've had a very sad with the painkillers um pain medicines are wonderful.
Speaker 2:Thank god we have that's right but you know, there we we and the pharmaceutical industry pushed this on the doctors and they created this change in attitude where we began to just hand it out like candy. Yeah, we did, you know, 30 years ago, and it's terrible, terrible, and the doctors knew better. They say they didn't knew better. My dad was a doctor back in the 70s talking to me about opioids and how addicted they were. So, nevertheless, when we reacted to that overprescribing, in my opinion there was an unfortunate overreaction in that regard. And now we've made it, I think, in many cases too hard for people to get the pain meds that they need, the legitimate pain meds, and my mom's 91 and lives with me and it's a struggle for her to get the pain meds she needs. I find that terrible. Right, there's so many people out there that need legitimately the pain meds, but we have this sort of knee-jerk, quick reaction to our societal problems and our politicians want to say, oh, I did something, so I passed this law or something. But the law doesn't necessarily get down in the weeds and look at you know what's really going on. But I'll tell you a funny anecdote. I was at a middle school in San Marcos last year and this is one of the schools that brings me in every year and I've been going there for maybe 10 years now. So every middle schooler that comes through this San Marcos middle school, woodland Park School every middle schooler hears me three times as they go through every year six, seven, eight, six, seven, eight. And I love doing, I love working with the school Great reception.
Speaker 2:When I went in last October the counselor said Rocky, I got to tell you something. One of our eighth graders a month ago went to a trampoline park and the kid fell and shattered his femur, which is, I'm told, one of the most painful injuries you can have. And he goes, and the paramedics picked him up and they took him to the ambulance. Somebody said well, now we're going to give you some fentanyl to help you. And the little eighth graders started screaming no, no, I don't want fentanyl, I don't want to die. And the school knows about this, because the mom called the school two days later and said I don't know what you're doing for drug counseling, but keep doing it. And I find that story to be just marvelous because that's exactly the kind of visceral reaction I want your kids to have, sure, when someone's around him at the party. I want them to like physically reacting don't get that stuff away from me, right? And the kid got the fentanyl, of course he got the under medical, under medical it's pharmaceutical fund under medical conditions, right.
Speaker 2:But you know, I I know. I know that when there are people listening to this podcast and I tell that story, many are going to cringe. I think, well, that's terrible. You created this understated trauma in that child and others are absolutely going to go damn right, that's what I want and that's the population that supports my work. I don't have the answer for the people that don't support what I do and what people like me do. I don't know what they think they're doing for the kids. I don't know if they have some other plan to protect their kids, but I'm in a place now where I'm just like I'm done arguing this. You know, it's so obviously necessary to me that it's almost, in my mind, negligent if we're not doing it in my mind negligent if we're not doing it.
Speaker 1:You talked about trauma vomit. Oh yeah, and how do you handle it? I mean, you're supposed to be a tough guy. You had this law enforcement career and not suggesting that you're not tough, but that's a different approach. Right, you work with these kids. All you can guarantee is that 100% of your kids are young, innocent souls. Right, you got to carry that with you at some level.
Speaker 2:Well, when I first started focusing on reaching those collateral damage kids I call them right, I call them the collateral damage kids I had to kind of get my messaging right around it and I've improved my messaging about it and I have a slide In the middle of my presentation. I have a slide. It says crime, poverty, child neglect, child abuse. And I stop and say everybody, look at me, everybody look at me, and I'll have 2,000 kids and everybody does they, thousand kids and everybody does. They all look at me and I go if you're living any of this, it's not your fault. Sometimes in high school, say it's not your damn fault, like I'm yelling, it's not your fault. And the kids are kind of shocked. And the next slide I show is dozens of pictures of these selfies of these kids who come up to to share their trauma with me. And I said look, and I know I have to tell you, it's not your fault, because all these kids told me, yeah, it's their fault, their dad died from an overdose or their brother died from an overdose or they started using drugs at 10. And I said look, if you're suffering from it, it's not your fault, it doesn't have to be your future. And I'd say to these kids look, sometimes the hardest three words in the English language to say are I need help? Yeah Right, everybody understands. We say are I need help? Yeah Right, everybody understands. We as adults don't like to say it, kids don't like to say it and I beg, I implore these kids look, if you're suffering, you don't have to suffer in silence.
Speaker 2:Now, many of the kids who come talk to me and share their pain with me, I'll say are you talking to anybody else? And they go no, I'm sorry, I can't, I can't let you go, but the vast majority of kids are telling me about something that's historical or in a way. I don't think I have to mandatorily report it, they're just sharing some general pain with me. But I asked her are you talking to anybody else? And they go no. And I go why not? And I get different answers.
Speaker 2:And one of the things I've realized our kids are very savvy and many of them who are suffering understand that if they come to a school official and they tell them the plain truth about what's happening, they're going to go to foster care, dad's going to jail, and they don't want that. That's right. So they don't tell anybody and they carry the pain around inside and that, as much as the pain they're sharing with me crushes me, the fact that they're bearing it alone crushes me. So I beg these kids to find if you're carrying the pain around. Find Dave, find your counselor, find somebody at the school that you trust and say, look, I need help. And that person is not going to interrogate you, they're not going to demand you. Tell them everything. You don't need to tell them everything. Just tell them at least that you need some help and get some support so you don't suffer in silence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that speaks volumes, too, to the level of trust that you're enabled to engender in 90 minutes with kids. These are situations where, as you say, kids are savvy. As humans, it's tough for us to trust people. If you've been in a situation of of abuse or neglect or poverty, I'm sure that those trust. Uh, you're on anti-trust red alert, right like, and so, uh, we see it all the time where kids don't want to talk to the formal counselor who's in that role, they might talk to the PE coach or the security guard, whatever it is they're not they're not even going to tell the teacher Not even that right, not even that, because they don't want their life to be stabilized.
Speaker 2:So there was a very upscale public middle school here in San Diego I won't name the school, but a very upscale school had me come in, I did three grade level assemblies and it's the first that please tell somebody you need help. First time I used it and I had. When I was done, the eighth graders were lined up. It was lunchtime and the eighth graders lined up for 30 minutes to wait in line to come share their trauma on me. And I was sitting on the edge of the stage and the counselors from the school there's a large counseling team these young women came and sat next to me, right, because they wanted to get over here. So I'm fine, that's great. I got no problem with that. I love that. Does that have a chilling effect? No, oh, okay. Well, they were to my right and the kids were at my left. So the kids are coming up to me, yeah, and it's so amazing. The kids will stand in line stoically until it's their turn and then the tears they start crying me.
Speaker 2:Their stories, like some are, some are like, horrifying, some are, like, you know, not that bad. It's bad for the kid, but in my mind it's. You know, their trauma is not as severe as I see many places, but I make each kid feel like their trauma is like. You know, I get it. But as the kids were finishing with me, I said, oh no, I'm sorry, so I give the kids my hug off and they walked past me and then the counselors would go hey, do you want to come talk to us? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It was insane and the poor counselors were heartbroken and we talked afterwards and I said look, it's not that they don't love you, it's just the way we've structured our system is. They're not going to come share with you this stuff because they don't trust the consequences.
Speaker 1:You're part of the fabric. You're part of the admin.
Speaker 2:You represent the admin? Yeah, right. And law enforcement? Yeah, I mean, I was just at an adult opioid conference last friday in in missouri and cops are not willing to go tell management, hey, I got a problem with drinking or drugs. Why? Because you know that changes that's going to change their reality, so they keep a bottle up. So, uh, part of my work, you know I have so many things that I'm trying to do with these kids in this hour or 90 minutes, right, but part of it is to get the wounded kids to feel a little more willing to try to share, you know. But the stories are chilling and the first, really one that just absolutely crushed me.
Speaker 2:I was at San Ysidro Middle School and the seventh grader came up to me after my assembly and there was a lockdown actually. So I'm giving my assembly and the school got locked down for some reason while I was there. So I was stuck for an extra hour there and finally this kid I saw him come close to me and walk away. Come close to me and walk away. Finally the kid comes up to me. Hey, I give him a hug, Tell him what's your name, I go. Why are you here? Why do you want to talk to me? He goes no, my brother overdosed at home yesterday.
Speaker 2:I said, how old is your brother? He goes 15. And I go why are you here? And he kind of shrugs. And I go what kind of support do you have at home? Oh, my dad overdosed when I was two. My other brother got killed by his cartel guys. And I go do you have any support at home at all? Well, I just met your school counselor. In my mind I'm dying and it's what the kid's telling me. That's horrifying. But it's how, matter-of-factly, he's telling it to me, which is equally horrifying. Right, Like I'm doing everything I can to not look as shocked as I feel.
Speaker 2:And I said what about talking to your counselor? And I said what about talking to your counselor? No, so I gave him my card. I said, dude, do you ever think about using? Yes? I said, well, you're carrying too much trauma. We talked about trauma. I said, dude, if you ever get weak, here's my card. Of course he's never called me, but I offered him my number. You call me 24-7. If you decide to use, you, call me. But I walked and I sat for an extra hour or more in that parking lot just absorbing, trying to process that level of pain in this little 13-year-old kid. But I went to therapy. I had to and so I went to therapy and I've gotten to a place now where, yes, these stories do.
Speaker 2:I can't put up shields, so I have to let the stories in, which is why the kids trust you and the kids sense that. But my crow friend, Les, their tribe, does the smudging, the belief system where they burn sweet grass or bare root and then they take the smoke and they cleanse themselves with the smoke. And when we did our presentations together, Les actually smudged me. We walk out to the car and he uses his ritual to kind of cleanse the negative energy and negative spirits off me. And I don't do that, but I sort of think like that when I'm driving away from the school I actively focus on okay, I made those wounded kids feel heard, I made them feel safe.
Speaker 2:You know, the school staff got to see, just like your staff gets to see, and in some of the kids too, which is another beautiful thing. One more story I'll tell yeah, yeah, no. So I was at Lemon Grove Middle School a few years ago in the seventh grade. Huge five, 600 kids in the seventh grade and a group of kids comes up to me afterwards to talk. Now, I have done this enough. There are the exuberant kids who want to come up and tell me hey, my uncle's a.
Speaker 2:DEA agent or my brother's a board or whatever they like the DEA thing, right? They want to shake my hand. I say thank you, but when the kids are laying back, I've learned to harden my heart. Because they're laying back, they're waiting and they want all the other kids to leave. So then when they come up and share their pain with me, no one hears it.
Speaker 2:So I have three daughters, so I have a particular soft spot for young ladies. Right, and this little girl comes, the seventh grade tiny little thing comes up to me, beautiful girl, and she whispers to me how old are you? She goes 12. I go um, I've been clean from meth and Coke for seven months. I go what? And she goes yeah, I've been off. I've been off Coke and meth for seven months, and I happened.
Speaker 2:And she tells me a very sad story about the business her mom's in and how the mom shares this with her customers and and this girl just started using I don't know this girl's name and she's telling me this. So what do I do with that? Right? So I don't know the girl's name. So I took a selfie with her doing my little. I do a little, my little hand gesture like that she's my future. And then I shared that with the school district. I said, look, you know, this girl needs some. With her doing my little, I do a little, my little hand gesture, like that she was my future and then I shared that with the school district.
Speaker 2:I said look, you know, this girl needs some support. And the district counselor goes oh my God, we know who she is. She's a nightmare for vaping. So she was like their number one offender for being this intransigent vapor and they couldn't figure it out. Well, they didn't know any of the underlying trauma because she wasn't sharing it with them. So that little moment of intervention was incredible for that girl's life because all of a sudden the district took a completely different approach because in her context, vaping is a good thing. Right, If she's using the vaping to stay away from the meth and the coke.
Speaker 2:You know, it's all relative, Not saying she should do it in school, but that was just a really cool example where a child who's hurting severely, hurting, unknown to the school district or the school, you know my intervention, my presence in the school, caused a benefit for that child, and that happens A lot. Of the kids who come up to me are ones you already knew about. There's always kids who come up to me that the school didn't know you know were hurting you know we're hurting.
Speaker 1:Well, I look, I, I know we've spoken about the fact that there's a lot more need in san diego county than is being met by requests coming from schools and I, you know I districts need to take this seriously.
Speaker 1:You know, I've experienced the kind of gatekeeping mentality around a lot of different stuff I think in in this profession, whether it's curricular, whether it's people being really risk averse, whether there's this perception that things aren't politically correct and having someone with a former law enforcement background come in like whatever those are.
Speaker 1:Someone with a former law enforcement background come in like whatever those are. I don't think we're doing nearly enough at Einstein for kids, but it sounds like we're doing a lot more than many other places and that's kind of that's really unacceptable to me, me, so, um, it would be sad if this, if your work then expanded nationally on a different um stage that's bigger, that's broader, it wouldn't. That was great for kids, but it's a sad commentary on local um, uh, intransigence around like we need to do something. That's the 16 number that you cited needs to go to zero, not to mention there's all this, these, these concentric rings of impact that go out into society. We didn't even talk about homeless populations. There's probably all kinds of overdoses that happen that perhaps never even get registered on the on the metric.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I'm not afraid to talk to the homeless, right. I mean, if they look like they're present, I'll talk to them. Right, right, right. And I mean I'm fascinated how do these poor people end up in this miserable condition? Right, and it's always this interesting moment when I say I'm a former DE agent, there's this moment of Right. They try to process that how former are you yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:But then I say, but can I talk to you? Yeah, I say okay, is drug abuse one of the main reasons you're on the street? 100%, all of them. Yes, right, many causes, but all of them identify drug abuse to me as one of the main causes, and this is published as well in the published studies. This next question it hasn't been published. I haven't found it anywhere. And this is what baffles me, because I ask what I think is a very obvious follow-up question Wow, well, what age were you when you started?
Speaker 1:using 8, 9, 10, 11.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and why Trauma trauma, All these different traumas? Yeah, so they started self-medicating when they were in our schools to deal with unaddressed trauma like vicious trauma. And then I say but when you were going through school, did you ever have any kind of meaningful drug prevention education? And they all go, no, and I get enraged at that because I look at these beautiful people rotting in our streets and they're all somebody's child, somebody's loved one, and we're in our compassion. We're letting them die in our streets and they've all told me that they started using drugs when they were in our schools, when we had a chance to reach them and we didn't even try and we hyper-focused on overdose, the death from overdose, the death right, the collateral damage, those concentric rings of damage extends so far massively beyond that, Costing society in so many ways. And we're not even asking the right questions.
Speaker 2:And I don't understand, and you know, these billions and billions that they're throwing at trying to mitigate the homeless. If we had 1%, literally, if we could get 1% of that to fund programs like me I'm not saying me, but programs like mine across California and do what I do and try and reach those little kids who are using at that young age and make an invitation to pull them towards, pull them towards recovery resources. Don't wait till they're a lifelong, 10-year addict and trying to undo all the carnage. Get them when they're newly into the addiction process and maybe there's a higher level. We're not trying and schools currently are not set up for that. I'm not blaming you for not doing it. I don't want your job. You've got a hard time running the schools but all the other mandates you have. But on the societal level I don't get it because we seem to abandon the idea of prevention.
Speaker 1:And on the, you know you made an interesting comment about parents not coming out to and we run parent universities. I think we might've had you, if I'm not mistaken, come to one.
Speaker 2:Either or two or three parents.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah yeah, but we don't get really a lot of parent turnout at all and I think part of that is for a lot of people that's just someone else's kid, as they have about you know, some curricular issue or what program is or is not being taught, or who is or is not being indoctrinated with. Whatever people think is this ideology or that ideology no one ever died from, from being taught a controversial ideology.
Speaker 1:We can debate the role of race in history and thankfully we can do it in a way that no one's going to die tonight, but the other and people come out and come out with pitchforks for that. But there's other things just kind of just quietly there.
Speaker 2:Well, years ago so it was, you know, 10, 12 years ago I did an event in San Diego where each school district has a student services director. Yeah Right, and they're not the academic. Their focus is on the culture on the campus and the support activities of bringing the kids. So there was a forum that brought people in from all the districts to listen to different prevention resources. And as I was listening to the different prevention resources explain themselves, when it was my turn, I stood up and said look, there's a continuum of intensity On the left side over here we have Barney. I love you. You love me. On the right side, you have me. Just to be clear, I'm that guy. I'm going to go there. I'm going to make kids cry. It's going to generate conversation in your school, your community and your population. If you don't want that, don't bring me me. And of course, there are schools that do want that, just for whatever reason. They do syncretically. Schools that have kids die are willing to do that. People in an administration have lost family members or people just have a different consciousness. But I still get high schools telling me so.
Speaker 2:At the time the consensus was that my program was only appropriate for high schools this is 10, 12 years ago, man that my program was really only appropriate for high schools with the intensity that I was bringing. Well, over those 10 years now I'm mostly now in middle schools and even being brought down and I'm doing some fifth and even some fourth grade presentation same presentation Now I changed the intensity a little bit, but it's pretty much the same program. And that's not because those administrators woke up and said, oh, we need to do this. They're now seeing the drug behavior that we used to see in high school migrate down the middle, down into elementary, and the parents don't understand this. They don't understand how accessible the drug is. They don't understand how far more potent everything is than it used to be.
Speaker 2:And I wish parents would get involved and I wish we could teach them, but they're not. Yeah, right, but even when I'm teaching the little kids, they understand everything I'm talking about. Of course they do, right, there's nothing I mean. And the kids that cry in my presentations, it's because they either are touched by the humanity of it, right, which is beautiful, or, you know, they've lived it. Yeah, and you know, I think a lot of school administrators aren't willing to go there. They don't want to create an assembly where somebody might cry, but when this problem is so pervasive and it's waiting for our kids and it's going to continue to wait for them, who are we as a society that we don't feel an obligation to warn them?
Speaker 1:And we put a lot more energy and time into planning for mass shooter incidents in schools, which undoubtedly are just devastating beyond words but statistically really really unlikely to happen Quite rare, thank God. They happen way more frequently in places of business and public big box stores and stuff, so people should be prepared for that. But this idea that we don't want to upset our little kids and, by the way, every little kid is carrying around a super powerful computer in their pocket that they can look up anything and everything they want at all, we'll do.
Speaker 2:they'll do schools, we'll do active shooter drills and things so like that's not. That's pretty traumatizing for a kid. You know, when we were young that's pretty traumatizing for a kid. You know, when we were young we had the nuclear. I'm old enough to remember we had those get-on-your-desk nuclear drills. That was kind of traumatizing but we did it. No, but it's interesting, right. So I come in and I talk to kids about the drugs. I have had kids come up to me after my assemblies saying Rocky, can you come back and talk about bullying? Can you come back and talk about bullying, can you?
Speaker 2:come back and talk about porn. Right, and it's not because they think I'm some expert in these areas, they just like my style. That's right. Let's get real Now.
Speaker 2:The porn is is is bullying obviously is everywhere. Porn is interesting because the kids bring it up to me and yet I have yet to meet the administrator and I understand why this willing to go there. So the porn that's available to the kids through the devices is terrifying to me and how it's warping their sense of self-worth, their self-identity, their sense of relationships, and we're not even willing to talk about it. Something else we're not talking about is sexting and sextortion, and there's this whole sick culture of kids and adults grooming children to send them nude pictures in exchange for gifts or money and then they use those pictures to torment the kids. And there's been tragically numerous teen suicides in America as a result of the sextortion that we're not willing to talk to the kids about. So you know, but some of that stuff I get the controversy in it. I do not at this point, looking at modern America, understand how what I do is considered remotely controversial.
Speaker 1:I don't think so either. I don't think so either. I really which is why I wanted I'll always the doors will always be open here for you to come work with our kids, and I respect what you're doing. You don't have to do it. You could be having a peaceful retirement and not traveling all over the country, and you're probably flying into towns that have little tiny airports and getting in rental cars and driving across Montana to show up somewhere and eating at Applebee's and all that good stuff. But it's definitely. You know, you're changing lives. So thank you, thank you for your service with, for our kids.
Speaker 2:Oh, I thank you for that. I appreciate it and the biggest appreciation I could possibly get from you is is what you do and you're extremely protective of your kids and you give me the chance to come in every year. You know and address your kids and that's I have profound appreciation for, for the trust that you give me.
Speaker 1:So thank you and thanks again for the opportunity to talk about it. Absolutely. Thank you, rocky. For people to find you, I think. Can you just give us your website?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's my name. It's www. Rocky R-O-C-K-Y, heron H-E-R-R-O-Ncom, and you'll find out about my program. In addition, there's a tool that anybody listening has to use in their schools or in their homes.
Speaker 2:The County Office of Education in San Diego funded the production of a series of short videos 15 to 20 minutes, or six of them that we broke my program, my single session, into six parts, six components that we hope work as standalone. We also hope they work as a series. They come with a teacher's guide, they come with classroom exercises and they're free and they're in English and Spanish and they are available on our website. There's no registration. We put no barriers. It's frustrating because we don't know who's using them. We don't want to put any barriers there, but anybody listening to this podcast that wants to sit down with their own kids and generate the conversation in their family, I encourage you to go on my website, find those videos at the bottom of my page, sit down with your kids and watch them and when the video ends, say, oh my gosh, is that really what's going on? You know you can always talk to me about this stuff. If you're in a school, you're a teacher. We designed them to be short. Any teacher anywhere can find 15 or 20 minutes a week right to run one of these videos and infuse this into their program.
Speaker 2:We don't have to do a full stop. This doesn't have to be, in my opinion, to give the kids some minimal warnings. Are the warnings that I can give in a single assembly, as you alluded to? You know we're barely doing enough for your kids. But it's in. The reality of running your school is what we can't do right, and hopefully you are given the funding and the resources to do more, and hopefully you are given the funding and the resources to do more. But to the many people who detract from what I and other people like me are doing, that it's not good enough, true, I'm the first person to say, I'm the first person telling everybody listening what I do isn't remotely good enough for the kids, but I believe it's infinitely better doing nothing. It's infinitely better than doing nothing. So at least I have that.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you. I encourage everybody to check out your presence online. Look on LinkedIn as well. Great videos on there, and photos, too, from the different schools and organizations where you've spoken. So thank you so much for your time Rocky today. As always, it's a great pleasure.
Speaker 2:Happy to be here.
Speaker 1:I hope you enjoyed this episode with Rocky Heron today, as always, it's a great pleasure. Happy to be here. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Rocky Heron. Please give us a five-star rating wherever you listen to your podcasts and consider donating to the show. Just click the support our show link for more information. Thanks for coming on in to hang out.
