Power of the family meal

Power of the family meal

By Pamela Cowan, Leader-Post/August 10, 2009

Dubbed the "most famous narc in America," Bob Stutman says the number of times parents eat dinner with their kids every week will predict whether they will be drug addicts.

"The higher the number, the less likely the child will have a long-term drug or alcohol problem," said Stutman, a former Special Agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). "It is probably the best long-term predictor. If parents are having dinner with their kids, it probably means they care. When you are at home, you are interacting with them. But very few parents do that today, unfortunately."

Stutman admits when he was in charge of the DEA's New York office, he was never home for dinner.

"What it means is that when you are home, you are paying attention to your kids," he said. "I work with about 30 high schools a year and kids line up to talk to me about their drug use. That's because kids want to talk to an adult they can trust and is being honest with them."

Tobacco use and the age a youth starts using drugs are also predictors of long-term substance abuse problems, Stutman said.

"The average age of first use in the United States is about 121/2 (years) and in Canada it appears to be 131/2 ... The younger, the more dangerous," he said.

When Stutman retired from the DEA in 1990, he established The Stutman Group, a firm that designs and implements substance abuse prevention programs for communities, corporations and school systems. He was in Regina for two days last week to speak to members of TEC -- an organization that provides learning and development for company presidents and business owners.

Stutman debunked the myth that only poor kids use drugs and challenged the audience to accept that their families or their businesses aren't immune from addiction problems.

"Just because they happen to be generally successful people in their community who live in nice homes, in nice areas, it can be their kid," Stutman said in a phone interview. "Substance abuse in the workplace, which is both drugs and alcohol, is as prevalent in Canada as it is in the United States. If you pretend it isn't there, it can have huge negative consequences on your company ... Family or workplace substance abuse doesn't get better if you pretend it isn't there. It's like a communicable disease that doesn't self-cure. You have to interrupt the chain."

To break the chain, Stutman said kids must be taught to deal with peer pressure.

"The problem is in the short run, when kids experiment, it feels good," he said. "One of the things that we fail to tell kids is, 'Yes, in the beginning it does feel good.' If it didn't, nobody would go back to it. By the time you realize that it's messing you up, it's too late to do something about it."

When he was head of the New York office, Stutman was targeted by the Columbian Cartel for assassination.

"I had a contract on me for 19 months," he said.

After retiring from the front lines of the drug wars, he began speaking tours all over North America.

"I don't have to do it for the money," Stutman said. "It's a calling if you will. I've seen too many kids dead."