Impact of drug crimes on users' families noted

Published: 1/24/2013 8:37 PM | Last update: 1/24/2013 11:36 PM By Ken Stephens - The Hutchinson News - kstephens@hutchnews.com One element of the cost of drug crime that cannot be qualified is its rippling effect on the families of drug users.

When fathers go to prison for drug-related crimes, families often end up on public assistance, and when mothers go to prison for drug crimes, their children often end up in foster care, said Shirley Faulkner, director of substance abuse services at Prairie View Inc., a private drug and alcohol treatment organization.

In school, the children raised in chaos have a harder time concentrating, Faulkner said, and they don't connect well with others because they have been taught to keep secret what they see at home.

"One of the rules of addicts' families is 'Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel,' " Faulkner said. "And so these children learn that 'What happens in our home stays in our home.' You don't go to school and talk to anyone about it. You don't talk to teachers about it. If anyone asks anything about it, it's none of their business. So children have to repress many of these experiences that they endure and have to keep that within themselves."

Those children can respond to the home life in two ways.

Some will pour their anger, frustration and sense of helplessness into their academic work and become high-functioning, successful students.

"There are some children who just (think), 'This is what I see, this is how I've seen it affect people, this is how it has affected me, this is what has stolen my childhood from me, and I want absolutely nothing to do with it and I will go in an opposite direction from what I've been raised with,' " Faulkner said.

More commonly, however, children from families where substance abuse is prevalent go the other way.

"Because education is not a priority, there is little interest given to the child at home about doing well in school and studying and receiving help for what they need," Faulkner said. "So typically we'll see many children in our adolescent program who are juniors and seniors in high school and cannot read, cannot write and cannot spell. And it becomes a lifelong handicap for them.

"The concentration levels are certainly diminished for children who don't have that resiliency factor, or a high measure of it. They will also act out and become somewhat self-destructive. The anger, the frustration, the sense of helplessness they have, being raised in the environment they are, has to come out somewhere."

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Impact of drug crimes on users' families noted