Drug education program in schools to include focus on fentanyl: 'Just Say No was not enough'

The current fentanyl crisis has caused a shift in drug education. Now, schools and police departments feel children as young as the 5th grade should learn about the dangers of hard drugs.

The D.A.R.E. America program has been around since 1983, and originally taught kids to “Just Say No to Drugs.” Now, its message is changing, and Venina Smith says her son could have benefited from the updated curriculum.

“My son passed away on Sept. 16, 2020, from fentanyl poisoning. He was 40 when he passed away, and he had been dealing with addiction and mental health for a number of years since he was a teenager,” Smith said. 

Smith said her son’s drug addiction started in middle and high school even though he received D.A.R.E.’s police-led Drug Abuse Resistance Education. She believes the program needed an upgrade.

WASHINGTON FATHER WHO LOST TWO SONS TO FENTANYL OVERDOSES PLEADS FOR CONGRESS TO CRACK DOWN ON DRUG DEALERS

“It was outdated. ‘Just Say No’ was not [enough],” Smith said. “Just say no, but say no to what?’

Now, the federally-funded program’s curriculum has shifted to “Keeping It Real.”

Dennis Osborn serves as D.A.R.E. America’s western regional director. Osborn says the updated curriculum helps bring awareness to the harsh realities of new drugs and the consequences of addiction. 

“We start teaching them in about the 8th grade, and middle school, about addiction cycles and how the brain works and how it can get addicted to certain substances like heroin, fentanyl, opioids,” Osborn said.

TEXAS SCHOOL DISTRICT ON THIRD FENTANYL OVERDOSE DEATH AS POLICE MAKE FOURTH ARREST CONNECTED WITH DRUG DEALS

The CDC reported monthly overdose deaths involving fentanyl for people ages 10 to 19 increased over 180% from 2019 to 2021.

The Houston Independent School District re-initiated it’s D.A.R.E. program in the fall of 2020. Brittany Burden, who serves as a Houston ISD D.A.R.E. officer, said drugs are changing and advancing – daily. 

“Five or 10 years ago, we didn’t know exactly the extent of the problem with fentanyl, and so now our kids are exposed to it. They can get it as easily as it being in some food or getting from some candy from one of their classmates,” Burden said.

In 2021, D.A.R.E. added a fentanyl fact sheet to its program – a change Smith says could help save lives.

“Some children start experimenting at about 12,” Burden said. “If we don’t get the message out about what these drugs are doing, and how fentanyl is involved with a lot of these illegal drugs, kids will think ‘oh, it might be OK.'”

D.A.R.E. reports approximately 6,000 law enforcement agencies – nearly one-third of America’s departments – incorporate their officers in schools across the country. 

In addition to a newfound focus on fentanyl education as the opioid crisis rages, there are other school programs similar to D.A.R.E., such as The All Stars Core Program and the Child Development Project, that address teen suicide and social media safety awareness.

New comment by yokto in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2023)"

Journee | Berlin, Germany, Europe | REMOTE, VISA | Full-time | https://journee.live

==========

At Journee, we are building the platform to enable brands and creators to deliver high quality immersive worlds instantly accessible to the world. Our clients are top global companies (BMW, Vogue, WWF, Siemens, etc.) and we are scaling fast to meet the demand.

If you are a reliable person, who would enjoy growing rapidly with our easy-going and high-performing tech team, please get in touch!

The tech team is remote-first and works 4 or 5 days per week within +/-2 hours of CET. We are currently looking to find the right fit for the following positions, but also general talents!

* (Senior) DevOps and Infrastructure Engineer

* Senior Core Game Engineer (Unreal Engine)

* UI/UX Engineer

* Senior UI/UX Designer

* Senior Product Manager

and more! For some of the above roles, there might not be a published job post yet at the moment, but you can apply via another role in the Tech department.

Our tech stack: TypeScript, AWS, Infrastructure as Code, React, Unreal Engine, WebRTC, C, C++ and C#

To apply, go to https://grnh.se/0779a752teu

Generally Intelligent (YC S17) Is Hiring Senior Software Engineer (Remote)

Generally Intelligent is an AI research company working directly on building human-level general machine intelligence that can learn naturally in the way humans do. Our mission is to understand the fundamentals of learning and build safe, humane machine intelligence. Here are our open roles:

Machine Learning Engineer (Remote, Contract or Full-time):
https://jobs.lever.co/generallyintelligent/9411e2ec-502a-403…

Research Scientist (SF, Full-time):
https://jobs.lever.co/generallyintelligent/6c25a25c-35ec-4d7…

Machine Learning Research Engineer (SF, Full-time):
https://jobs.lever.co/generallyintelligent/c2f4a435-1eef-489…

Systems Engineer (Remote or SF, Full-time):
https://jobs.lever.co/generallyintelligent/7afede07-8f22-4c4…

Technical Lead Manager (SF, Full-time):
https://jobs.lever.co/generallyintelligent/75fac008-22e5-49a…

Infrastructure Engineer (Remote or SF, Full-time):
https://jobs.lever.co/generallyintelligent/e66a55a3-a117-406…

Senior Software Engineer (Remote, Full-time):
https://jobs.lever.co/generallyintelligent/38a93a78-fb8d-461…

Technical Interviewer (Remote or SF, Contract):
https://jobs.lever.co/generallyintelligent/8443234d-a8c7-439…

Technical Recruiter/Talent Coach (SF, Full-time):

https://jobs.lever.co/generallyintelligent/c4c09fff-ec4a-496…

Theory Engineer:
https://jobs.lever.co/generallyintelligent/63499488-91b1-415…

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35836933

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Meticulous (YC S21) is hiring founding engineer to build AI for testing

Hey HN!

I’m Gabriel, founder of Meticulous.

Our mission is to radically accelerate the pace of software development for every company in the world. We’re starting with a tool to catch UI bugs in web applications with zero-effort from developers.

How it works: Insert a single line of JavaScript onto your site, and we record thousands of real user sessions. We then replay these sessions on head and base commits of PRs, take screenshots at key points, and diff those screenshots to catch visual regressions before they hit production. We employ novel techniques to eliminate flakes. You can watch a 60-second demo at [meticulous.ai](http://meticulous.ai/).

We are a London-based YC company. Our engineering team previously worked at Dropbox, Opendoor, Palantir and Google, and have previously led 100+ engineer organizations at these companies. We raised $4m and are backed by some of the best founders and technical leaders in Silicon Valley, including Guillermo Rauch (founder Vercel, author next.js), Jason Warner (CTO GitHub), Scott Belsky (CPO Adobe), Calvin French-Owen (founder Segment), Jared Friedman (YC partner and former CTO of Scribd) and a bunch of other incredible folks.

Catching visual regressions is just the start. There is an entire category of products to build on top of replay. This ranges from catching exceptions to revealing the performance impact of frontend code.

We want to change the way the world develops software, and influence software approaches for decades to come.

We are seeding a London office and hiring an onsite founding engineer to join our team of four. We sponsor visas.

You will have autonomy in building out this technology, but here are a few problems you might work on:

– Build a distributed system to concurrently replay thousands of sessions, such that a developer gets a result in seconds.

– Speed up the replay of sessions in a way that retains determinism.

– Derive algorithms to detect sessions that cover differing code paths and edge cases, and ignore sessions that are too similar.

– Help build out a team of world-class, highly collaborative, software engineers.

As founding engineer, you get to shape the company, and build the culture and technology from the ground up.

What we look for:

In a sentence: Technically brilliant, delightful to work with, combined with a self-awareness and strong desire to improve. We also want to make sure everyone is highly supportive of each other; we win as a team.

We’re currently only looking to bring on folks with senior level skill sets and 5+ years of industry experience. You should have strong web fundamentals and a deep love for software engineering. Maybe you enjoy programming books like Clean Code, Designing Data Intensive Applications, Pragmatic Programmer etc. or enjoy hacking on interesting side projects. You value transparency and candid feedback, and are motivated by a strong desire to become the best engineer you can be.

You can read about our values here https://ruby-wish-a8f.notion.site/Mission-Values-979c32ec58e…

You will be given the space and time to up-level yourself as an engineer in terms of conferences, reading, or whatever you think will be most valuable. We will also set you up with mentorship, if you desire it, from top engineering leaders (folks running 100-engineer organizations at the world’s leading tech companies).

You’ll get to work alongside some of the best engineers there are, break new ground solving truly novel CS problems and deliver something that transforms how software is built.

If this sounds interesting, please reach out to me at gabe [at] meticulous [dot] ai with “HN” in the subject line and 2-3 sentences about what you find interesting about Meticulous and your resume/LinkedIn/GitHub.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35840485

Points: 1

# Comments: 0