BOUNTIFUL—Kids are bombarded with choices, some good some not so good. Making decisions now while they’re young can make all the difference in what happens in the future. Students at Valley View Elementary had the chance to meet first responders and DEA agents during the school’s Red Ribbon Safety Week and hear about why they should stay away from drugs and other unhealthy habits. 

“If someone makes the choice to take drugs they might have some additional struggles they experience in life,” said Mark, a full-time DEA pilot with the Salt Lake Police Department. “What are your goals? What do you want to be? Anything you do can help or hurt that. What do you think it does when you choose to do drugs?”

It doesn’t mean you can’t overcome that, he told a third grade class. “But why do the things that make it harder for you? So think of your short term goals and what you need to do to accomplish that thing.”

Drugs have a huge impact on it, said Chris, a task force officer. “Does anybody have any family members that they know who have had a problem with drugs?”

Several hands went up. “Now everybody look around,” he said. “This is just one small class for how many people are affected by it. Take a whole community such as Bountiful that probably has 80,000 people. That’s a lot of people who are affected by it. The whole state really.”

Chris told the kids they should talk about this when they’re young. “Eventually there’s going to come a time when you guys may have a friend that offers drugs. That’s the beginning of that pathway we talked about. If you say yes to drugs that might lead you to struggle with drug addiction and all of those things.”

So remember if they ask the answer is “no,” said Chris. “There’s a lot of different types of drugs. It’s just good to stay away from them. If you ever have a friend that offers those, they're not really friends are they?”

“What are drugs?” said Jerome, a DEA agent. “If we take drugs what could happen to us?”

“We could die,” said a few children. 

“That’s why we don’t do drugs,” he said. “Drugs are bad for us especially now. We deal a lot with something called fentanyl. It’s really, really dangerous. It even comes in pill form so that they look real but they’re fake.”

So people take those pills and they die, Jerome said. “That’s one of the biggest things we’re fighting right now is fentanyl.”

Jerome demonstrated for the kids the equipment they had to put on when they’re responding to where people are making drugs. “Some of the environments that we go to are so dangerous for us that we can’t even breathe the air that’s in the home so we have to put on these base suits.”

They also demonstrated to the kids what their drug sniffing K9 could do. “Todd’s two and a half,” said K9 officer JR. “ He came to us from a ranch in Wyoming and then he learned how to do this job.”

He’s trained in the odor of meth, cocaine and heroin, said JR. “So his job as my partner is when we go out to places we look for drugs and he has a nose that can smell a thousand times better than I can smell them. So he’s able to go through multiple vehicles, buildings and bags and tell me where the drugs are.”

JR laid out two bags and demonstrated what Todd could do. “What he’s going to do is sniff both bags,” he said. “He’s going to tell me which bag has drugs in it. You’ll see different changes in his behavior and then he’ll sit.”

“That tells us that there are drugs in that bag,” Chris said. “That’s what he does for cars, inside a house, all over everywhere we go.”

The Davis County Sheriff’s Office also brought its BearCat for the kids to see. “It’s very cool,” said third grader Knox Whittington. “I like that they can deflate the tires and then inflate them. It can go through rain, snow and mud. It’s so cool.”