Former NY Jets player talks about ills of drugs, alcohol

A little star power never hurts when trying to get a message to kids, and Superior locals proved that when they turned up at Superior High School to listen to former professional football player Dennis O'Sullivan talk with local teens about drug and alcohol abuse.

O'Sullivan, who played football for five years with the New York Jets, the San Francisco 49ers and the Houston Texans, visited Eureka, Troy, Libby, Plains, Polson, Ronan, and Superior on behalf of the Lake County Flathead Reservation Coalition for Kids and Mineral County Healthy Communities last week. Since the beginning of September, O'Sullivan has spoken with more than 50,000 kids.

Around 50 people showed up to listen to O'Sullivan speak in Superior, including Superior Mayor Michael Wood, Montana Representative Gordon Hendrick (R-Superior), police officers, and several other community figures.

“This is one of the most impressive meetings I've been to in the state of Montana,” O'Sullivan said.

O'Sullivan is the vice president of the American Athletic Institute and he travels the country talking with kids about drug and alcohol abuse.

While the main focus of his talk Friday was alcohol and recreational drug use, O'Sullivan touched on problems with steroids and other drugs as well.

“You don't get looking like that drinking wine coolers,” O'Sullivan said after showing the crowd a picture of a muscle-bound steroid user.

O'Sullivan said Montana has the highest underage binge drinking rate of any state in the country and parents should pay careful attention to what their kids are doing.

He presented surveys to the crowd that showed that around 40 percent of parents would give alcohol to underage kids in their own homes in order to keep them from drinking and driving. O'Sullivan said this meant parents should watch their kids carefully because they could be drinking in their friends' homes.

“It's very easy to give excuses for why youth are drinking, but we're done looking for excuses,” O'Sullivan said.

O'Sullivan compared drinking to having a hole in a roof. “When you have a hole in the roof of your house, it only leaks a little water in at first and is very easy to repair,” he said. “If you ignore that hole and continue to allow water to leak in, eventually you will have to replace the entire roof.”

O'Sullivan showed the group studies that determined that a 12-year-old child who drinks regularly will have done irreparable damage to their brain by the time they reach the age of 21.

“Think of a 26-year-old person that can't get it together. When I think of those people at a young age, I usually think they were drinking and doing drugs,” O'Sullivan said.

O'Sullivan said that even without drinking, a person is most likely to die of unnatural causes, like car wrecks and other accidents, between the ages of 14 and 24. He said drinking only increases those odds.

“There are millions of teenage alcoholics in this country,” O'Sullivan said.

He said the main focus of his work was getting to athletes because they are often the trend setters in high school environments and they are a very accessible group of people.

O'Sullivan told the high school athletes in the crowd that studies have shown being drunk once has set Olympic athletes back two weeks of training and cut four minutes off of their time in a test that measures how long an athlete can endure physical stress. He also told them the injury rate for athletes that drink is 54.8 percent, while the injury rate for non drinkers is 23.5 percent.

“I was part of that 23.5 percent,” O'Sullivan, whose football career was ended by a leg injury, said.

He also talked with the athletes about marijuana use, telling them the amount of THC, the chemical in marijuana that causes users to get high and damages brain cells, in marijuana has gone from 4 percent in the 1970s to 40 percent today.

O'Sullivan also attacked people who discount the effects of drug use because of statements like those from football player Randy Moss, who has admitted to smoking marijuana. “Randy Moss might be the best receiver in the history of football, but we'll never know,” O'Sullivan said.

O'Sullivan spoke to parents telling them it is their responsibility to keep their kids off of drugs and alcohol, too. “Parenting is the most underutilized tool for combating underage drinking,” O'Sullivan said. “You might feel as if you're annoying your kids, well good, that means you're doing your job.”

After O'Sullivan spoke, Brenda Simmons, a representative from the Montana Community Change Project, spoke to the crowd.

Simmons said the Montana Community Change Project is a community based program that is designed to combat the way the state of Montana looks at drinking.

“You guys have an opportunity to change the culture around underage drinking,” Simmons said.

Simmons said there will be 24 town hall meetings around the state by the end of April on the same subject. She said the project will use evidence based strategies that have been proven to work to change the culture around drinking in Montana.

Simmons said the local representative for the project, Denyse Traeder, will present the community with different strategies and community members will pick out the ones they think will work the best. Individuals at the state level of the project will advise the community on how best to implement those strategies. Simmons said the project will last for three and a half years.

“If we do our job right you guys will be equipped to carry out this project long beyond the three and a half years,” Simmons said.

She compared the process to smoking in America. Simmons said that when smoking was first banned on airplanes there was a public cry of outrage, but now many bars do not allow smoking and there will never be smoking on airplanes again.

“It's not a quick fix, but it's an achievable permanent community driven fix,” Simmons said.