Summer break from high school or college is a cause for celebration among teens and young people.
For their parents, though, it’s a worrisome time: More than 30% of teen car-crash deaths happen in the short time between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The stats garner the summer an unbecoming nickname: The 100 Deadliest Days.
The Phoenix Center, the county authority on alcohol and drug abuse that is focused on addressing substance-use issues, is hard at work on prevention programming ahead of and throughout the 100 deadliest days.
The center’s mobile substance-education unit travels to schools and community events — for free, wherever it’s requested — in partnership with the county coroner’s office to give hands-on simulations of what it’s like to drive impaired by drugs or alcohol, two factors which play a role to crashes each year.
Amanda Davis, Phoenix Center’s director of prevention and community-based services, said that the mobile unit has reached tens of thousands of people since its unveiling.
“There’s an education piece to it we want people to understand,” Davis said about the impaired driving simulation, in which a person drives either a motorized cart or pedal-powered cart while wearing so-called drunk goggles. “When they come back from the course with the cart and we process with them, almost everyone says, ‘That was a lot harder than I thought it would be.’
“The goggles, they only affect someone’s vision, whereas substances would affect the whole person, including with delayed reaction time,” she said. “It makes people realize it could be a lot more difficult.”
It’s with programs like the mobile unit that the Phoenix Center tries to steer young people on a path away from self-destruction and danger. The center has been on a mission to prevent, reduce or delay substance use for more than five decades and is the convening member of the Greenville County Enforcing Underage Drinking Laws Coalition in partnership with Greenville County Law Enforcement, SLED, college and university representatives, and others.
The EUDL Coalition has been effective in the creation of a multijurisdictional alcohol enforcement unit, which enforces alcohol-related laws through compliance checks, party patrols and traffic sobriety checkpoints.
With its emphasis on proper drinking laws, the EUDL Coalition has brought the number of alcohol sales to underage people down significantly.
“When the EUDL coalition began over 20 years ago the buy rate in Greenville County was over 40%,” Davis said. “However, the current buy rate is less than 10% and that is in part due to the collaboration of partners, enforcement operations, and education.”
You can request the Phoenix Center’s mobile education trailer for your school or event at phoenixcenter.org/service/mobile-education-unit.
