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Nearly 3,500 students across 42 states and DC participated in this year's C-SPAN Student Cam documentary competition. | |
| This year, we asked students to create short videos with messages to the president exploring issues important to them or their communities. | ||
| All this month, we're featuring our top 21 winning entries. | ||
| One of this year's second prize high school west winners are three 11th graders from Imagine International Academy of North Texas in McKenney, Texas, where C-SPAN is available through Spectrum. | ||
| Their winning documentary is titled Confronting the Opioid Crisis, a President's Prescription for Change. | ||
| It was midnight, the strike of Sunday morning, and I get a phone call. | ||
| The very first thing I hear on the other end of the line was this horrific scream in the background. | ||
| So immediately I knew something was wrong and I got up as quickly as I could. | ||
| And the parent on the other end of the line is in a panic. | ||
| Janelle, Janelle. | ||
| I think Noah overdosed. | ||
| How do you define opioids? | ||
| It's a drug that is used for pain reduction. | ||
| Prescribed pain medications are going to be for people who've had surgeries, for people who have chronic pain. | ||
| They are so much more sneaky and pervasive than they ever used to be. | ||
| We all started seeing everyone getting addicted to something that was prescribed. | ||
| It did have a very big shift. | ||
| Just about anybody could get a prescription for an opioid medication and distribute it themselves. | ||
| It'll strip away your family, your life, and, you know, remove everyone from you. | ||
| Opioids are a class of drugs that are used to relieve pain. | ||
| They work by binding to opioid receptors in the brain and body to reduce the perception of pain and produce feelings of euphoria. | ||
| Coming out of COVID times, you know, we lost five students out of the same school district in a matter of weeks. | ||
| I had a youth on probation and she wasn't a drug user. | ||
| When she got off probation, she was dating a guy who provided her with what everybody would think is a prescription pain pill, but it turned out to be one of the fake pills and she died. | ||
| When I was a kid screwing up with things like Xanax, it couldn't really kill me. | ||
| Right? | ||
| When my parents were kids screwing around with things like weed, it couldn't really kill them. | ||
| Mexican cartels and other criminal networks are mixing fentanyl with other drugs like cocaine, meth, and heroin, and also marketing this fentanyl in a new form. | ||
| Fake prescription pills. | ||
| 70 to 80% of the drugs in the market are cut with fentanyl. | ||
| I was the uneducated man in the kitchen playing chemists with drugs I knew absolutely nothing about, just like these drug dealers are doing right now when they're mixing every drug on the market with fentanyl and they're killing the people we love. | ||
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100,000 die every year and nothing's being done. | |
| Not enough is being done. | ||
| Numbers are going up, not down. | ||
| Two milligrams is a fatal dose. | ||
| So if you can picture pouring like a sweeten low or a sugar packet off a dining table on your hand, that's 500 fatal doses. | ||
| I believed when I sold drugs genuinely that selling drugs was a victimless crime. | ||
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I truly believe that, y'all. | |
| I told them we'd take it away from me. | ||
| And then they realized Americans love prescription pills. | ||
| Americans love oxycontins, hydrocodones, all of these opioid-based prescription pills. | ||
| So they started counterfeiting them. | ||
| The cartels realized it's so cheap to counterfeit our pills. | ||
| So they counterfeit every pill you can imagine that you would get from a pharmacy is now counterfeited. | ||
| We may not know what they took because they may be unconscious, but if they have certain signs and symptoms, we're going to go ahead and try and give them naloxone. | ||
| Naloxone cannot hurt anybody. | ||
| So whether they're experiencing a medical issue, you don't know what it is, or if it is an overdose, you can still give them Narcan. | ||
| In Bexar County, the county that San Antonio is in, the average age of first use is about 12.5 to 13 years of age. | ||
| That means that we need to start having that conversation at that time, or someone else will have had that conversation for us. | ||
| They'll go talk to Janelle. | ||
| And that's what their Forever 15 project is about, is giving children outlet, supplying Narcan, just being there for them. | ||
| Conscious Condo is something that I started. | ||
| An organization, the goal of that is basically to cut the red tape where people are sitting on a solution and not doing anything about it, right? | ||
| Perfect example, Narcan vending machine. | ||
| I said earlier, it has been around for three years in Austin, Texas. | ||
| It has saved tons of lives. | ||
| I think what I want to do, what RISE wants to do, is to make sure that we treat naloxone like it needs to be in everybody's car, in everybody's person, everybody's first aid kit. | ||
| To really address issues with drugs is better mental health care. | ||
| Critics of the treatment drugs often say that addicts are just substituting one opioid for another. | ||
| Policymakers are divided on the best course of action. | ||
| Last year, we increased the average federal sentence for drug trafficking to its highest level since 2013. | ||
| For the first time ever, the Affordable Care Act made mental health care an essential service, which means many health plans must cover it. |