Sharing Resources for Substance Prevention

Hello. Welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White. And today I’m chatting with a new friend, Debbie Burnt, and she’s doing some incredible work in prevention. And I love her platform because it’s all about getting to the athletes. 

And we know athletes have their own subculture. have their own ideas and motivations behind what they do, especially at a young age. And it’s really, really cool to me that she’s niched down to develop some remarkable materials to really reach this student demographic. So Debbie from Substance Free Athletics, thanks for being on the show today. 

Thank you, Jake. It’s so nice to be here with you. Really excited. 

Yeah. 

Can you fill in any of the holes just so we can get to know you a little better? Whether it’s like, yeah, tell me about your family, your life, and maybe just how you got into this. 

Sure, sure, sure. So I’ve been doing prevention work and really kind of focused on parent education since around 2017. I got into this work in 2015 when in California we started looking at legalizing marijuana and we were hearing all kinds of things about that. Like it’s not addictive, we’re going to make all this money. And I was like, I have a lot of addiction in my family. 

I knew for sure it was addictive, know a little bit about accounting and figured we weren’t going to make much money about it. And in fact, we haven’t. And so then just ended up in public health and education after that time. And then as a parent of three kids, there’s an eight year spread, which means I was a high school parent for 12 years in a row, which is long time to be a high school parent. But I had kids that played sports and we, you know, with one of their teams, we realized that we had a pretty serious drug problem on that team. and we, we would be winning tournaments on Saturdays and losing them on Sundays and no big deal to be losing a tournament. But, you know, we were looking around going, this doesn’t quite make sense. And this is pretty consistent. Had a lot of kids that were using and getting high on Saturday nights when we were at tournaments really was affecting their play. So I was in prevention and I reached out to several research scientists and doctors that I knew to see, know, are we, we did a little research and looked like this could really be happening and they confirmed that, yeah, know, alcohol, marijuana, nicotine, they all affect the game and it pretty specific ways. And so we put together this curriculum to try and help athletes understand what that is and then also help coaches and parents understand it as well. So that’s how we got here.

Understanding the importance of prevention for young people

Okay. Wow. And what’s really fascinating about doing prevention, especially with young people, is there’s all this stuff that we did in the past couple of decades. And even now, it’s important to help young people think about their long -term future. But if you remember being young, and we know now by the science of it, our brains aren’t wired to think about our future that much. It’s just not part is developed yet.

What’s cool is that if a student is really, really motivated by their athletics and it’s something that they can grab onto and say, yes, of course I care about that, then now you’re doing prevention by something they care about, not just by what you care about. And that’s what we need. We need to find out how they’re motivated and what their goals are. And a lot of students that are young is athletes. That’s a big, big part of it.

Yeah, yeah, you’re so right. And to add to that, and I think we’ve learned this along the way, athletes are very motivated, as you said, for all the reasons that they are, but they’re also very team -minded. So that place where they wanna come together with their peers, with their teammates, they wanna set some goals and try to accomplish something together. 

Where they are already in the mindset of supporting each other. They’re in a mindset of, know, sports is a great place where you learn how to fail, right? You know, we lose games. And so what do we do when we lose? What do we do when we fall short, picking each other up? All of this kind of, I mean, kind of the essence of sports in a certain way, but also kind of esoteric really has come into play. And we find that athletes love this program. Because they pull all of the knowledge and all the kind of bio -science that we give them into the space and they really support each other and they really get on the same team, if you will, about this topic and then getting everybody, I don’t know, just aligned with it. It’s really pretty remarkable.

Explaining Substance-Free Athletics

Okay, cool. Can you tell me, like someone that you just meet brand new, I’ve never heard of substance -free athletics or what you’re up to, how do you explain it to the first time? Like, what is it? What’s substance -free athletics? 

So substance free athletics is predominantly a narrative, if you will. It is an explanation of what alcohol, marijuana, and nicotine do to the athlete’s body and those systems that an athlete relies on. It goes on to talk a little bit about opioids because we know athletes can encounter that through sports injury. 

It talks about addiction and then it does something that we call social norming, which is looks at in the drug use space, we have this real perception problem, right? Everybody always thinks everybody’s using and it doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kid, doesn’t matter if you’re a parent. Everyone thinks everyone’s using. Well, when we look at use data, we tend to see less use than what we perceive. It’s not non -use, but it’s less use talk a little bit about that too. The whole goal of the curriculum is to create a commonly understood narrative and vocabulary so that conversations moving forward can become more productive. We talk to athletes, we talk to coaches, and we talk to parents. About 70 % of what we say to each of those groups is the same to create that common understanding. And then we have some unique exercises and information that we share with each of the audiences that’s just unique to them. So I mean, guess that’s kind of that’s the bulk of it.

Implementing the Program: Presentation Based Curriculum

Yeah. And is it implemented? You mentioned through a curriculum. How does someone, like the people that are listening to this are most likely on a coalition or part of a community group that’s doing prevention. What’s the format of how people work with your program and yeah, what do they get or what do they use?

Sure. So it’s presentation based right now, which means it’s predominantly PowerPoint slides that have embedded videos throughout the explainer videos in different places. All of that is available for free. We have a lot of communities that are using the program. ask that they sign a licensing agreement that just lets us know who they are, lets us know who’s using the materials, and lets us just stay in contact. 

They don’t need to interface with us. They don’t want to. But in addition to the presentation and like PowerPoint slides, we also have a lot of collateral materials. So posters and flyers and stickers and all of that is available for free as well. What we find when coalitions are using the program, they’ll use the materials, get the information, do presentations into their community. And then it becomes this very fun exercise of how to kind of ingrain this idea of protecting your game, being a substance free athlete into the culture. So a lot of that collateral material will be used. There’s lots of times communities will hold protect your game weeks where, you know, all of the sports that week, so the football game and the water polo match and the cross country meet and the volleyball game.

All have signage and announcements and flyers and that kind of thing to try and again, anchor this message into the community. So all that’s for free as well. It’s all available on the website. It’s how you get in touch with us, substancefreeathletics.org. If a coalition or community needs or wants a lot of training, a lot of implementation planning, they can hire us to help them do on a free, on a fee basis. But we really, when we got this information compiled and put together, when we saw the effects of it in our piloting phase, we really just want this message out there. And we want as many, especially high school athletes to get their heads wrapped around it as we can. 

Yeah, that’s great. And I love that it’s something where any community could pick it up and start using it right away. That it’s just very simple, straightforward. It’s not a technology barrier or anything else, a cost barrier. Yeah, I would love to talk more about the science behind it and your expertise. I know you have a few things that you could show us too in case people are watching on YouTube. They can see it, but can you talk us through kind of, yeah, the science behind it.

The Science behind Substance Use

So one of the things when we were developing the content, we would hear from our own kids, from the teenagers in our lives, from teenagers that we would query, okay, talk to us about drugs and alcohol. And one of the things we would always hear is, yeah, yeah, Drugs are bad. We know it. Okay, now what? And so what we wanted to do was really try and take that conversation out of that really high level, yeah, drugs are bad or some kind of moral conversation. And we wanted to drive into it and drill down into it. So we put together what we call our substance science core. And are you seeing this on the screen?

Yes. Okay, cool. 

So we didn’t want to have a conversation about right or wrong or morality or, you know, not even social justice. We just wanted to really have a biomechanical conversation with athletes and we wanted them to understand drugs and alcohol from that perspective.

So we would start by just talking about these things, these substances for what they are. So things like alcohol is a depressant. It makes a person drunk predominantly through dehydration. Most people don’t really think about that. It does some other things in the brain, but one of the major mechanisms is it dehydrates a person’s brain. And so the neurochemicals don’t run across the cells as well in the brain, and it causes in part the drunkenness. We also know that alcohol is water soluble, which means a person drinks and it washes out of their body in roughly 24 hours. And then we know that the impacts of alcohol are largely physical in nature, which means things like a person drinks and it constricts their aerobic metabolism, which reduces endurance or it makes weight really difficult to maintain. Lots of athletes are in weight rooms trying to gain weight. Some are in weight rooms trying to redistribute weight and the alcohol gets in the way of all that. 

We also know that alcohol inhibits the absorption of nutrients. And so what does that mean? Well, lots of athletes are on special diets relative to their sport. And even if they’re not, all of us are eating food for the proteins and the carbohydrates and the minerals that we get out of our food. And that makes our bodies function well. And alcohol can get in the way of that, reducing endurance, increasing injury. And then alcohol also affects sleep, which is a big part of recovery. When you’re an athlete, tearing down tissues and rebuilding for greater strength and agility is all part of the sports process. 

Sleep is an important part of that process as well. And then we know that performance within 24 hours of activity significantly reduces aerobic, actually use within 24 hours of any kind of activity significantly reduces aerobic performance. And so, I’m talking to high school athletes, but a lot of them have adults in their lives that are runners. And if you talk to any runner, that runs in any kind of serious way, they will tell you there is no way they would drink before race. They feel it so completely even the day before. And then this last point relative to alcohol is really what gets a lot of athletes’ attention. We have research that shows weekly use of alcohol doubles the rate of injury. So what is weekly use? That’s week -end use, right? So that beer, on a Saturday night might not just be a beer on a Saturday night. And we don’t want to be crazy about that. Not everyone’s going to show back up to practice and get injured on Monday, but it’s doubling the chance of that happening, which is a pretty significant impact. 

And then we move on and we’ll talk about marijuana. And again, same thing. What is it? Lots of people are confused that just marijuana, weed, pot, cannabis is really talking about the same thing, that cannabis plant, that is just the Latin name for it. Marijuana contains cannabinoids like THC, the one that makes the user high, CBD, and there’s a bunch of others. Marijuana is actually on a drug class, largely by itself. One of the major characteristics of that class called psychotogenics is that they are hallucinogenic, which means they distort time and space, they distort perception. 

And then unlike alcohol that makes a person drunk in a really general way, marijuana makes a person high in a very specific way. And it’s by spoofing what’s called the endocannabinoid system. And I think I said this to start out, but if I didn’t, obviously some of this information is a little bit technical and we hear, we don’t need athletes to take a test on this. They don’t need to be able to recall endocannabinoid system, but they conceptually understand what the drugs are doing and they carry that with them into the field, if you will. And then here’s an example of a video that we’ve put together to try and explain some of more technical nature of it. And this is the fact that marijuana is what we call and that means it’s fat soluble. So here’s what that means.

So let me stop there for a second. I can take you through a little bit more and show you another video where we talk about the endocannabinoid system and its relationship to sports. But what do you think? 

To Protect your game challenge: Setting

Yeah, that was a well -done video, by the way, too, with all the animation and things coming in and out. It kept it really engaging that it didn’t just feel like a voice. We got to watch it. That’s really cool. 

Yay.   Yeah, it’s, I guess that, mean, some of this stuff is pretty, but it’s also really important to understand the decisions that we’re all making and be making the decisions that we want to. So when we find it’s pretty effective. 

Yeah. Is there any. When you’re going through this with students or communities, do they ever ask, is there a survey that they do too with it? is it, how do y ‘all deal with that question? 

Yeah, that’s great. Great question. So all of our presentations start with a pre survey and a post survey. Let me just ask you real quick. Are you let me stop sharing? we go. There we go. They all start with a pre survey and a post survey. So, you know, we ask a set of questions in the beginning. We ask the same set of questions at the end. 

That’s in large part trying to determine are we conveying information? are we imparting knowledge? Is there knowledge transfer, I guess? And then we also have some open -ended questions about, in the end, things like, did your opinion about alcohol, drugs, or marijuana change? And we’re looking at starting to talk about some more longitudinal studies where we really track behavior to see if we change behavior, a pretty complex research project. But short of that, we just wanted to know in this moment, has anything changed for you? And we see lots of knowledge transfer, 20 to 40 % of answers are didn’t know, now I do know. And then with regard to that opinion, I love that question because we get about 50 % of athletes that tell us yes, My opinion’s changed and we get 50 % to tell us, no, my opinion hasn’t changed. And on the nose, we always ask for an explanation. Almost always do we get, I was never going to use, I always knew they were not great for my game. This isn’t telling me anything that I didn’t already know effectively. When we dig down a little bit deeper in that, we find it’s not that they knew the science, but they knew they didn’t want to use. So we’re just confirming for that cohort why they might be making the decision that they’re making or reinforcing that, if you will. And then for the ones that say, yes, my opinion’s changed. I mean, we hear all kinds of things. Like, I feel like I scripted as a prevention professional. know, I won’t feel so stressed about it in the future or I didn’t know it was so bad or I’ll think twice next time. So again, in that moment, I think we’re making an impact, if you will, or at least getting them to think about it, which is great.

Yeah. And it’s another positive experience with prevention geared towards what they want and you’re educating them. It’s a piece of the prevention puzzle. And I think it’s really cool. And I love to hear the fact that even though surveys, It takes a while to tailor them to get the information that we want. And sometimes it evolves and we use different methods. 

So it’s really cool to even hear, like you said, the students that say, I mean, it didn’t change my opinion about using them because I wasn’t going to, because those students need prevention as well to continue solidifying that experience and to show them positive social norms that not everyone is doing this and everything that comes with that. So I love that.

So the athletes in the program or that were in early on in the program at one point, we’re like, okay, substance free athletics is great, but we want something that’s more our own. And they came up with the phrase, protect your game. They were like, that’s, that’s our statement. We can get behind that. And that makes sense to us. The next year we work and we have a council of athletes and if there are any high school athletes in the country that are interested they can join our council. actually impact the program a lot. They give us a lot of feedback. We make a lot of changes because of this council. Anyway, they wanted to kind of work on engagement and so we talked about well how can we further engage the athletes that hear the program and we talked about pledges and all kinds of stuff and at the end of the day.

A high school kid does not need more commitment, more things in their lives, more things that they’re managing. So we walked away from the pledge, but they came up with these five questions that we call the Protect Your Game Challenge. And at the end of our presentation, we literally just popped these five questions up on screen. The first one is what surprised you about the presentation? Again, it’s a little technical. Let’s anchor some of that information for each of them by getting them to talk about it. And then the next four questions, just kind of hit it. And they say, can we have a substance -free season this season? What kind of challenges would we encounter in doing that? How can we support each other in that effort? Can we have a wingman or wingwoman? Can everybody find a partner? What are some things that we could do and plan that are substance -free? And we literally spent two to five minutes with that up on the screen, breaking the room into smaller groups, asking them to talk about it among themselves for two minutes, five minutes, nothing major. And then we have them share back out. And high schoolers are just hilarious and great. And they’re just all over the place. If they’re laughing, they’re reverent, they’re funny, some are serious. And they share back out just a little bit on what they talked about. 

And then we break and everybody goes to practice. We tend to have some swag and, you know, get to just a little bit of sticker or flyer or bracelet or something to take with them. And what we think we’ve done in that moment, what we hear back has happened as we’ve super validated the non -users on the team. So, and we’ve given them, if they want it, a platform to elevate their voice. And not every non -user does. Plenty of high school kids are never going to talk about this again, whether they’re using or not using. But there are some that do kind of step into that void and kind of are like, yeah, what are we doing? Let’s do this. We can do this. And it becomes this very game, goal -driven exercise for a team, for example. So we’re validating non-use voice. We’re elevating that. We’re giving them a context in which they can influence each other. And then we’re of handing this topic to them and taking us, the adults, in their lives out of it because, you know, we don’t want them to have no support, but at the end of the day, they decide if they’re going to use or not. At the end of the day, they make, they support each other in their decision making. So to kind of start the conversation or give them a way to start the conversation and then, you know, trust that it’s going continue on in the way that makes sense for that team and those kids or not. But it’s just really a very empowering place to be as a prevention professional as well. Anyway, so I can’t remember what question you asked me. It’s my very long answer to.

I can’t either, but whatever it was, I’m glad I asked it because this sounds so, so incredible. Like I want to be a part of this. like, yeah, can I like get this in front of more people? Get it to my schools that we present at and partner with like all that stuff. So if you’re listening and you’re part of a coalition, you’re part of a school, it’s Substance Free Athletics. Correct? 

Yes, perfect. Everything’s there. How to get to us, what the program is, everything’s there. We’d love to hear from anyone. 

Amazing. Well, let’s end this way. If there’s anything else you want them to check out, I know you said you have videos, materials, everything’s on your website. It’s free. The curriculum’s there. You can use it. If they want to get in contact with you, how do they do that? 

Yep. So the email is on the website as well, but it’s info at substance-free-athletics.org. And we also have a, I already talked about, have a licensing agreement that we just ask users of the program to fill out. So if you fill that out, we’ll also be in touch as well. Yeah, there’s just, the website’s key. That’s what the hub of everything. 

Okay, amazing. So there’s some dashes between the words on the website. 

If you just, yes, that was really the email address. And I think it is true for the website address as well. But if you just type in Substance Free Athletics, it pops up with or without dashes. Yeah. Okay. 

Okay. Perfect. Well, Debbie, this has been awesome. Can we end this episode? If you have one just tip or advice for prevention professionals around the country or something you just really believe in, let’s end on that note. Just, yeah, what can you leave us with? 

Gosh, the pressure. I think prevention is this amazingly complex space, right? And there’s so many ways to approach it. There’s so many messages that are important and to each of us as prevention people, I think we all kind of have certain messages that really resonate for us that we really want to get out there. And I think one the most important things I’ve found through the years of doing this work is I always have to look at my audience and I always have to put myself in position of my audience. Because what I want to tell them is not necessarily what they care about. And so trying to think about what they care about, what’s going to motivate them, what they’re going to find valuable, and then coming at it from that perspective. 

But certainly with parents and obviously with athletes, we’re obviously really targeting down into that group of people. But it’s just always important to be, I mean, maybe we just call that empathetic. I’m not sure, but. 

I love that. And it’s so true that if you’re talking in general to everyone, you’ll reach no one. But when you have a target, you understand your audience, whether you need to interview them, whether you need to partner with them to create materials, whatever it is, you’re going to be more successful. So I love that parting piece of guidance. Thank you for that. And for everyone else that’s listening on the Drug Prevention Power Hour, just know that you’re doing incredible work. You’re part of the team. So stick with it. We need you. And just let us know if you need anything for partnerships in the future and check out SubstanceFreeAthletics.org and check out everything that’s there. And you know what? Share it with a friend and share this podcast with a friend and a colleague in prevention. We’ll see you next Monday for another episode.