my names Devin
im amazing
and thats all you need to know
=)
oh and Nicoles my bestfriend

When it comes to addressing Victoria's growing drug problem, health authorities maintain that public education through the media is one of the most effective tools at their disposal.

On the other hand, there's no shortage of critics who suggest that media coverage of drug-related issues encourages drug use by publicizing and glamourizing the latest mind-altering substances.

"It's taking a risk in hopes that the potentially small amount of harm you cause will result in a greater good," said Vancouver Island chief medical health officer Richard Stanwick.

"This isn't the sort of stuff that is polite dinner conversation. Unless we can get these things discussed in families, there are kids that are going to fall victim."

Questions about the media's role in drug awareness and education have been especially pertinent since the death of 13-year-old Mercedes Rae Clarke earlier this month.

The Central Middle school student passed away less than 24 hours after ingesting a substance she thought was ecstasy that was purchased from a downtown street dealer. Toxicology results have yet to be completed and health authorities say the precise cause of death may never be known, but there has been speculation that Clarke suffered an allergic reaction to something in the pills and some suggestion that they contained crystal meth.

The tragedy occurred despite months of intense news coverage about the dangers of crystal meth, leading to speculation that media-fueled publicity may be partly to blame.

Joanna Young of the Drug Addiction Help Line, a Vancouver based organization that refers clients to rehabilitation services across north America, said studies indicate that anti-drug messages have a major impact on teen drug use.

Young cited a recent report by the U.S.-based Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration that found the vast majority of youth aged 12 to 17 are receiving drug and alcohol prevention messages through the media.

"Kids who are exposed to anti-drug messages are significantly less likely to do drugs," Groves said. "So any kind of public service announcement, drug education or anti-drug message will affect somebody. That just shows us we need to step up awareness to the public."

Called the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the report estimates that 83 percent of teens are exposed to these anti-drug messages.

"The kids who are exposed look at ( drugs ) in a completely different way. Some of the kids start to cry and say 'my friends who do this are going to die,'" Groves said.

However, Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said the media walks a fine line between informing the public and blowing the drug problem out of proportion.

"One of the biggest thing is, the media tends to love a drug scare," said Nadelmann, who spoke at the University of Victoria last week. "If a person's first use with a drug doesn't match the scare stories, then it's a bit of a double-edged sword. The exaggeration discredits the really accurate health-care information that's out there.

"The most important thing is that the information is accurate. If you're going to be honest about a drug, you have to say the good and the bad."

Stanwick said those who might criticize a media outlet for publishing the ingredients used to make crystal meth are ignoring the likelihood that teenagers have ready access to that information via the Internet.

"We live in the information age and this information is available to anyone who can surf the Internet," he said. "Most of what you're talking about, the kids already know."

George Orr, a professor with the B.C. Institute of Technology's media program, said too often the media becomes a scapegoat for drug tragedies.

"Crystal meth is no more glamourized than blowing up vehicles in Baghdad is glamourized. People don't become alcoholics because they see a whiskey ad in a magazine," Orr said. "There's always some people who, no matter who they are, are going to do what they're going to do."



Everyone Loved Mercedes

By Anne Mullens
The first time I really saw Mercedes-Rae Clarke, she was in Grade 7, standing in the schoolyard, a tiny bird of a girl with big brown eyes and an impish smile. She was 12 years old and my daughter Kate’s new friend.

I had heard about “Merch” from Kate for months. Mercedes had moved into my daughter’s French-immersion class in Victoria earlier that year, a new kid from Calgary thrown among a tight group of students who had been together since kindergarten. Soon she was among the most popular in the crowd. All the boys had a crush on her, and all the girls wanted to be her friend, consulting her on hair and clothes and music and all the things 12-year-old girls spend so much time talking about. Kate would say, “Merch says this” and “Merch does that.”
But this was the first time I’d had a good look at her. And I thought: What a beautiful girl. What eyes! She had a big smile and a big laugh for someone so petite and delicate. The other girls towered over her.
Over the next 18 months, I got to know her, driving her in a carpool to dance class each week, often hosting the sleepovers that seemed to occur almost every weekend at someone’s home. This is the Mercedes I knew: an adventurous, outgoing sprite who loved to shop and socialize, excelled at dance, loved to try out new hairstyles. My daughter Maddy, two years younger than Kate, idolized Merch because, unlike with some of the older girls, when Merch came over, Maddy wasn’t excluded. Merch would brush Maddy’s hair and give her a new hairstyle and include her in all the talk.
A video of Mercedes from a school camping trip last spring shows her sitting by the campfire at night, stuffing one marshmallow after another into her mouth until she reaches an astonishing ten, cheeks puffed out like a crazy chipmunk, and her classmates doubling over in laughter. That was a typical Mercedes moment: an imp with eyes dancing in merriment, playing the crowd.
A few times, on dance-class nights, her mother, Sherry, would call to say she couldn’t get away from work just yet. Could Mercedes stay with us until she could pick her up? Sherry worked at a downtown funeral home as a mortician. I knew her call meant a family was having trouble with a death and she needed to spend extra time with them. “Of course,” I’d say, knowing first-hand the juggle working mothers do to keep children safe, with friends.
Sherry was a hard-working, compassionate, strong mother of three. Along with Mercedes, she had two sons: Chris, a married adult, and Kody, a year older than Mercedes. Sherry had mustered the courage to leave an unhealthy relationship with Mercedes’s father to forge a new life on her own in Victoria with her two younger children. They lived in the suburbs, but Sherry wanted Mercedes to have the benefits of a French-immersion program near her work, and that entailed a long commute to and from town for the two of them every day.
The last time Mercedes was at our house, before the fateful day that changed everything, Kate and Mercedes spent a lazy August afternoon, hanging around our backyard, jumping on the trampoline with Maddy and mugging and posing with our digital camera.
And then, around dinnertime on Monday, September 5, 2005, the day before she was to start Grade 9, Kate burst out of her room, tears streaming down her face. Mercedes, she wailed, had tried the drug ecstasy. She had never tried any drugs before. She was now in hospital on life-support!
Our first reaction was utter disbelief. After phone calls, however, our disbelief turned to shock and despair. The day before, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a lush Victoria park, Mercedes had decided to swallow a tiny pink pill given to her by a friend. She was with two girlfriends; one had tried ecstasy before and said it was fun. That girlfriend had bought three pills for about $10 each from a guy on the street in downtown Victoria.
When the three girls swallowed the little pink pills, Mercedes began almost immediately to vomit. Soon she complained of a terrible headache and that she couldn’t see. Then her eyes rolled back into her head, and her body contorted in a seizure. One of the girls ran to the nearby house of a family friend to get help.
When Sherry arrived at the hospital about 90 minutes later, her child was unconscious, medical staff working around her. Mercedes never woke up again. Over the next 24 hours, she continued to have seizures, her blood pressure skyrocketed, her temperature soared, she had multiple heart attacks and resuscitations. She was placed on life-support on Sunday night. Everyone prayed a miracle would save her.
By late Monday night, Mercedes’s brain scan showed no activity: The tiny pink pill had rendered her brain-dead. Sherry was then faced with what must be a parent’s most agonizing decision: to disconnect her child from life-support, donate her organs and let her die. The medical staff gave the family time to say goodbye. On Tuesday, the halls outside Mercedes’s room were full of people: cousins, aunts and uncles, and friends. Sherry asked that close friends such as Kate come to see Mercedes.
For kate and me, saying goodbye to Mercedes in the pediatric ICU is a devastating memory that will never leave us. She was lying, pale and motionless, in an ICU bed surrounded by machines, tubes in her arm and throat, her lungs rising and falling to the whoosh of a ventilator. Her beautiful brown eyes, once so lively and bright, stared out, vacant and dull.
Mercedes was removed from life-support that Tuesday evening. Her organs were harvested for transplantation. Because Sherry was a licensed mortician, the hospital al