Youth learn of alcohol’s perils

• By JARED JANES
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Apr 20, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Tracy Mitchell prepared no script for the message she planned to deliver to the audience of teenagers attending the alcohol awareness concert at LSU on Saturday.

She would speak from her heart, she said, and she would speak from experience.

The lesson she said she wanted to impart to the youth gathered in the campus amphitheatre was that alcohol and drug abuse do not discriminate, striking everyone from college students to homeless people to beauty pageant contestants and businesswomen such as herself.

“Life is short enough,” said Mitchell, a former Mrs. Louisiana, in an interview while she sat in the shade and at the amphitheatre with music by one of 12 bands blaring from nearby speakers. “You’ve got to live it right.”

The O’Brien House, which serves those recovering from alcohol and drug abuse, hosted a concert and art show on Saturday to raise awareness about consequences of underage drinking.

Twelve bands volunteered their time for the third annual “12 Bands for 12 Steps Concert,” which O’Brien House executive director Katherine Martin said is used to alert teenagers about the dangers of alcohol abuse and how such behavior may serve as a gateway to drug use.

Martin, who admitted to starting to drink at 17, then receiving treatment in her 30s for alcohol abuse, said underage drinking is a “public health crisis” that is costly economically — a 2003 study by the Institute of Medicine found underage drinking consequences total in the billions of dollars each year — and socially in terms of lives affected.

A message of how substance abuse alters lives — including the persons suffering addiction — is what Mitchell, 42, said she wanted to discuss with the crowd later in the day.

The New Orleans native entered treatment at the O’Brien House three months ago after a friend recommended the center to her based on the reputation of its counselors, Mitchell said. The O’Brien House saved her life, she said, by providing her a place to receive treatment while learning from the experience of other clients, each with their own story to tell.

Mitchell started to abuse drugs two years ago when her husband of more than 20 years, the man she married in her teens and the father of her five children, died unexpectedly of an aneurysm, she said. Unable to cope with her grief, she became addicted to sedatives and, later, cocaine.

“I chose to sedate or up,” she said, “anything except to feel that pain.”

Mitchell, who owned businesses with her husband and competed in beauty pageants for married women, said she decided to seek treatment after growing tired of trying to hide her drug abuse.

At O’Brien House, she said, she has had a chance to listen to other stories of addictions — including that of her sponsor, who has been clean from crack cocaine addiction for almost 20 years — that make her believe she can win her battle.