Forgotten Yet Targeted: Drugs and Special Needs Children

Posted on December 8, 2024 View all news

Before I begin to spout story after story of the worst-case scenarios with special education students, their school environments, and the proliferation of drug use throughout, I must give some context to where I have been and to who I have seen. As a former educator, I have worked within school districts that were so poor and agrarian that most kids would walk to school as the only bus in the district did not pass by their house. I have been in schools so prestigious they could afford to construct and reconstruct a sports field twice over due to silly oversights and mistakes. I have seen schools in-between, stuck in the middle of the realities of rich and poor. In all of these schools I have met, connected with, and fostered futures with countless students who have come from all walks of life. But a through line that seems to perpetrate even the most affluent of districts is marijuana and other so-called “recreational drugs”.

          Perhaps it is one thing to pick up on in the news that vape pens and their contents are becoming an everyday excuse to enable certain socially acceptable drug uses. Nicotine is a classic example, but the seeping in of marijuana and other equally accessible drugs have grown in tandem with these practices. It’s often assumed now that a vape pen contains marijuana and is even celebrated as the alternative to nicotine, which is viewed as the “greater evil,” as it were. Most of us as adults can see that students and young kids consuming these substances at school reminds us of decades worth of anti-drug and anti-smoking advocacy. Think of the image of the bad kids at school, out behind the building, smoking away in a rebellious manner. To us, that was an active PSA to avoid a life of addiction and strife, but we were fortunate that it was packaged that way. With the recent normalization of marijuana, the accessibility of vape pens, and the complete lack of funding or disregard for anti-drug advocacy in schools and government agencies, kids have absolutely no negative lens to see those scenarios. For the students of today, those images of vape-smoking troubled youth are often spun in a positive light, a cool light, an advantageous light. In my experience, no students were more susceptible to a lack of guidance than those in special education.

            Special Education (also known as SpEd within the districts) students have historically faced systemic neglect and marginalization. Often forgotten and looked at as someone else’s problem, these students often fall through the cracks, both academically and socially. While general education students build bonds with teachers and grow to become everyday adults, often SpEd students need their basic social functions reinforced and learned from the very educators working to get them graduated. Basic societal norms, such as understanding right from wrong and practicing courtesy, need reinforcement for these students to take on the outside world. But now the outside world has come to them, and all its iconography, imagery, and social rhetoric is playing havoc on these students and the teachers attempting to stem the tide. These students are particularly vulnerable to the influence of the drug culture due to external factors beyond the control of schools and teachers. In my experience in the special education classroom environment, it was a constant battle not only to attempt to stop drug use but even to educate them on why it’s important not to partake in it.

The most common instance of drug use I saw was the notorious vape pen. Never mind the idea that the vape pen single-handedly stopped what was going to be the very end of cigarettes and smoking as we know it, undoing decades of hard work and social changes; students now have an easy-to-access, conceal, and use vessel to ingest more or less whatever they want. Often, I would observe students hiding behind desks, walking out of the building, or, of course, using the bathroom to smoke the vape. When these occurrences did happen, more often than not, the disempowered teachers would make a halfhearted attempt to scold the student or, at worst, ignore what was going on. So many times, a vape would fall out of a careless student’s pocket, or they would pull it out to make room in their bag, and the encouragement was to honestly turn a blind eye. I even recall an instance of hearing that a student was returning from being suspended for vape usage only to have a pen fall out of their pocket while they were returning to the classroom. At that point, all the educators were losing hope that any of the measures being taken to punish the child were working, so everyone just let it go. It’s shocking; it makes us no better than those who ignore the struggle of these students in the public, but the alternative was a reality that many underpaid and undertrained teachers were not ready to meet.

            Once the vape pen was seen enough there was an eventual need to take action, and here is where the real struggle begins. Taking away that vape pen, that so-called non-addictive weed they smoke, would often end in a full-on fistfight. The dependency these kids had on that drug was immense; while so many people argue it’s not addictive, no one fights that hard for something they aren’t addicted to in one way or another. Bloodied noses, police intervention, suspensions, confiscations, all for this little black stick that they can’t live without. It really was no wonder that our teachers were so unwilling to do the right thing, to some of them it might have meant doing more harm or making more work. Teachers in special education need to be very rich in one currency with these students, and that’s connectivity because if you can become these students’ friends or mentors, a great deal of the hard work simply disappears. Connectivity is key, but also creates problems in its wake, as mentioned before if the teacher wants to maintain that connection, they can’t sabotage it by enforcing basic anti-drug laws and eidetic.

Additionally, if you want to try to speak to them as a mentor or educator on the subject, they do not have the knowledge or training to speak to them about any dangers outside of what was learned in their own former education. And say you do have a teacher who is courageous, knowledgeable, connected, and respected by the students; how much do you think that matters once that bell has been rung and the students go home? As the kids leave the school with whatever education on right and wrong they have hopefully absorbed, they cross a line back into their home life that educators can not follow.            

Inside the school, these special education kids often watch YouTube personalities or musicians that glorify or normalize vaping and marijuana use and naturally want to emulate them. We do have no-phone policies that can keep the students from interacting with the internet at all, but this only works from the morning bell until dismissal. Once these students return home, all bets are off. More often than not, these students come from low-income households, broken families, and non-supportive units that either take a passive stance on drug use or even actively encourage it. One of the easiest ways for these students to get their hands on a vape pen or any drug is through a parent or sibling; almost every instance of a special education kid confessing to having one followed a caveat of “Oh, it’s my brothers.” As educators, we have zero follow through with this, and all that can be done is reactionary, which almost always ends in an altercation. These are children or young adults that struggle with their emotions and struggle to learn, having a constant back and fourth between what is right and wrong is naturally going to upset them or create a feeling of indifference towards drug use. So often, these kids that partake in the use of vape pens don’t understand the issue with it because home life either has no follow-up education or is partaking in its causal use, too.

            So the home life has no rules, school has too many rules, and as a special education student, you have to contend with being dragged between both of these as you already struggle with various aspects of your life that often come easy to others. The vape pen in their hands suddenly becomes less of a means to get high, but a means to have some agency in their life. They can take it from home and use it in school to rebel against the overbearing rules. They can use it at home, and no one says anything, leading to the idea that they are so cool that no one can stop them. And all of this comes back to the interactions between the SpEd students as stories and boasting. The vape pen makes you important, and it makes you better than everyone else around you. One of the scariest aspects of feeling so important with that drug is when money exchanges hands in order to procure it. Drug dealing was very common from what I saw, and altercations and threats happened when one student didn’t make good on a promise to pay for the drugs they had consumed. Beyond hard currency was the social one; students would look for a quick hit while in the class, maybe just a taste to feel like they were partaking in the fun of it all, and that would escalate further into more repeated drug use and sustainability. Now, there comes a situation where a special education child is seeking a drug they can’t obtain without someone’s help, and a drug dealer friend or family member of another student is more than happy to take their money or their debt. Students would dip their toes in the dealer lifestyle through intimidation, loans, and, more often than not, fragrant displays of their actions because, after all, what is it worth to these kids if others don’t notice them?

It all becomes a vicious cycle of dependency. The more they do it, the more others notice them and come to give them attention. Other students will ask you for the favor of using it, some will ask if they can buy its contents, teachers begin to notice you and talk more with you even if its often a negative interaction. I can not stress enough how valuable prestige and recognition are to a special education student. These kids are sectioned away, given different teachers and different expectations. They live different lives surrounded by others they consider normal or standard and watch videos of exceptional people living the way they want to. Their self-esteem is crushed day after day with each educational setback, so what other way is there for these guys to become noticed, to become recognized?

For a whole class of invisible and forgotten students, A puff of smoke or vapor may seem like an escape, but it can lead to serious and lasting harm.