Crime & Safety

With Heroin Use on the Rise, Holt Hosts Town Hall Meeting

Heroin use resulted in more than 200 overdose deaths in the St. Louis area in 2010.

The Wentzville School District will be hosting a Heroin Town Hall Forum Feb. 21 at 7 p.m. in the Auditorium at Holt High School in Wentzville.

The event is organized by the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse (NCADA) and local law enforcement agencies.

This forum is the latest in a series of similar town hall meetings throughout the region. The increased use of heroin in the greater St. Louis-area has grown to alarming proportions and resulted in more than 200 overdose deaths in the St. Louis-area in 2010.

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These forums are intended to provide useful information for communities in order to proactively confront the dangerous epidemic of heroin and prescription painkiller use by St. Louis-area teens. All of the meetings are open to the public, and parents and students are encouraged to attend.

Speakers will include representatives from the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse (NCADA) – St. Louis Area, the St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department, and Bridgeway Behavioral Health. Topics will include Education, Impact, Law Enforcement, Treatment and Recovery.

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For more information, visit www.not-even-once.com.   

Newly hired Wentzville Police Chief Lisa Harrison, who will be in attendance, said the meeting will put critical information in the hands of parents and teens.

“If parents don’t get and share with their kids the straight information about what is out there and what it can do to you, kids will believe what their friends tell them; and sometimes those friends’ advice can be deadly,” Harrison said in a release.

Harrison, according to the release, is excited about a new Test My Teen program that the Wentzville Police Department will roll out in the next several weeks.

The program provides parents free, anonymous, drug-testing kits they can use.

“This program is a win-win for everyone," Harrison said. "Families can address these issues privately, parents can help their kids say no to drugs, and kids can stop peer pressure dead in its tracks when they say ‘No thanks. My parents test me.'"


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