Survey shows Georgia teens less likely to try meth

A survey released this week by the Georgia Meth Project shows that Georgia teens are more aware of the dangers of Methamphetamine and Smyrna teens are no exception.

GMP is a large-scale prevention program aimed at significantly reducing first-time meth use through public service messaging, public policy and community outreach. The public service messages include the “Just Once” commercial that has aired on television. The ad shows a teenage girl trying meth for the first time and then shows the extreme measure she takes to get drugs. The end of the commercial shows the girl’s younger sister trying meth.

Avery Minnick, a rising-freshman who will attend Campbell High School in the fall, explained that she was deeply affected by the “Just Once” commercial.

“It made me really scared,” she said. “That’s a really scary thing to see how the girl changed; to see the changes to her body and what it did to her personality. I have a younger brother personally, and to see at the end how much it affected her sister, for me it kind of hit home because I would never want something like that to happen to my brother, especially because of me. It really struck me.”

Overall Minnick said the ads made her “never want touch the stuff.”

Minnick’s reaction seems typical of the teens surveyed. The GMP survey showed that 52-percent of Georgia teens now consider trying meth just once or twice a “great risk.” This figure is up 11 points from the benchmark survey conducted in 2010.

GMP attributes this to its ad campaign. The survey results show that 87-percent of teens thought the GMP’s ads show that meth is dangerous to try once or twice. Seventy-eight-percent of teens and 80-percent of young adults surveyed said the ads themselves made them less inclined to try meth.

“Methamphetamine is crippling our state,” said former Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker on GMP’s website. “We spend millions each year on meth-related incarcerations alone, and yet the number of addicts in Georgia continues to grow rapidly.”

Smyrna and its surrounding areas attribute to this statistic. In 2005, Smyrna was home to the first “super lab” in Georgia. That's when federal agents seized 174 pounds of meth from a home just outside the city limits in a serene neighborhood on Church Road.

“With a super-lab I don’t think there’s a standard definition for it,” said Smyrna Police Officer Michael Smith. “But a lab can be extremely small. It can be small enough that its contents can fit inside a milk crate or smaller. So a super lab is something large-scale, capable of producing large quantities of Methamphetamines.”

Smith reported that since 2007 there have been 16 incidences involving meth. Of these incidences, there have been three arrests made for possession of meth and one for manufacturing meth.

Smith clarified that the manufacturing arrest wasn’t a meth lab. The charge was based on the quantity of meth and how it was packaged. No meth labs have been found inside Smyrna limits.

Minnick said that neither she nor her friends had been exposed to meth while in middle school.

“I’m sure in the next few years it will come up,” she said. “In eighth grade in middle it’s more weed than actually Meth or something like that.”

Smith explained this situation is typical of most Smyrna teens.

“In the limited number of cases we have involving Methamphetamine, we have now data that suggests that it is a problem among teens,” said Smith.