EDITORIAL: Conner Story Too Familiar: Drugs, Alcohol Plague Small Towns
By The Lexington Herald-Leader, Ky.
Feb. 3–Tara Conner began drinking in her early teens in her hometown of Russell Springs. She showed up drunk at school when she was 14, her mother told People magazine.
By the time she reached New York as the reigning Miss USA she was an alcoholic, an addict who would use whatever came her way, including cocaine.
“For me, it all had the same effect. I was an equal-opportunity user, and nothing fazed me,” she said this week on the Today show.
So much for the once-popular, almost soothing, story that small-town girl Conner was so overwhelmed by the bright lights and ready vices of the big city that she lost her way and began partying and drinking at New York clubs.
“She’s just a small-town girl, and she just got in the big city,” one local fan said in Connor’s defense.
“It’s a story that has happened many times before to many women and many men who came to the Big Apple,” intoned Donald Trump. “They wanted their slice of the Big Apple, and they found out it wasn’t so easy.”
Well, no.
Like thousands of other young Kentuckians, Conner had access to alcohol and drugs very close to home. Operation Unite, the anti-drug effort in southeastern Kentucky, says almost 60,000 Kentucky adolescents need substance-abuse treatment.
What makes Conner unusual is that, within days of the crisis that put her crown in jeopardy, she got a month of residential treatment for her addiction.
Research has shown that, on average, people with drug addictions work harder to get well and stay well than people with other chronic diseases, such as diabetes or hypertension. We also know that it almost always takes residential treatment for at least a month to set them on the path to recovery.
In drug-saturated Eastern Kentucky, there’s one treatment center bed for every 10 people who need to be there. The wait is four to six weeks.
Conner said that even when she agreed to go into treatment, she really didn’t think she had a problem. “That’s your first step,” she said. “You have to accept that you are an alcoholic, and it was very hard for me to come to that conclusion.”
It’s very hard for us to acknowledge that addiction isn’t a big-city problem, that it is claiming tens of thousands of young people in Kentucky’s small towns, threatening to destroy their lives, tear up their families and blanket their communities with crime.
But acceptance is the first step toward recovery.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Lexington Herald-Leader, Ky.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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