 I'm Dave Winfield of the New York Yankees. Many of you have seen me on the field, but I'd like to talk to you today about what I do off the field. For the past few years, I've been involved in the fight against drug abuse, particularly with kids through my organization, the Winfield Foundation. This past year, however, at the urging of the Drug Enforcement Administration and your president, Mr. Eddie Fritz, I've agreed to get involved in drug prevention and education at a national level. I recognized that the national effort was consistent with my efforts with the Winfield Foundation in the New York metropolitan area. As a result of my training and orientation by the leaders in law enforcement and drug rehabilitation, I've traveled the country extensively, visiting with young people, coaches, and parents on the dangers of drug abuse. With me, it's more than a public service. It's a commitment I have as an individual who can influence our young people. They need our help and guidance, as each of them is going to be inevitably challenged with that decision about drugs. Now, broadcasters have played an extraordinary role in this process. More than any other media outlet, you have the attention of America's young people. Your commitment to responsible programming, airing public service announcements, editorials, documentaries, and newscasts on the topic of drugs, it's to be commended, as are the hundreds of community programs you've developed to address the problem. But now I'd like to give you something else I think will help make your efforts and mine all the more effective. With the help of the Drug Enforcement Administration, we've developed a 17-minute video that talks straight to youngsters about drug abuse and why you should have as much good information as possible before you make the decision to use drugs. It's a new approach. No preaching, no dramatics, just a plain, common-sense approach to the question of drugs. Now, I'm sharing it with kids as I travel and speak to them, and I'd like for you to do the same. I want you to take this tape that you're about to receive to the local schools and PTAs, bring in local athletes and coaches and law enforcement officials to talk to the young people in your community about the dangers and the consequences of drugs. You can sponsor a high school assembly yourself. You can even broadcast from the event. Have those who are role models for our youngsters do the talking. Enlist the help of students and parents and local businesses. Make it a community project. You've got the reach, you've got the know-how and the technology, and most importantly, you've got the ear of America's youth. If we work together, we can get the message through. Let's each of us team up against drugs. It's your decision. I came to the so-home that she took me and she choked me, and she said that before that dust kills you, I'm going to kill you because you're my daughter. And she got a stroke behind it, you know, and she got that stroke. I was really, I didn't know what to do because I was so dusted. I just looked at her and told my stepfather to pick up, you know, like if I really didn't care because I didn't feel no pain. I didn't. I didn't have no time for no pain. I'm Dave Winfield. As a professional athlete, I've seen drugs destroy the careers of gifted ball players. Worse, I've seen drugs wreck their lives. But it's not just ball players who are suffering. As a human being, I know the same things happen too much to too many people in every walk of life, from every level of society. It's because they do. Because there are so many casualties out there. Because the potency of today's drugs, like their availability, is up while the cost is down that each of us needs to fight drug abuse in any way possible. For me, one way is by serving his narrator for this presentation. Now we're going to look at drugs and their abuse from different angles. What we want when we're done is for you to be better prepared for that instant when you're offered drugs. We want you to say no. And we want you to know why that's the right decision. We are a society in which drugs play a major role. Many of those drugs are legal. Designed to repair the body, they are prescribed by doctors, prepared by a trained pharmacist, or so mild they can be sold over the counter. Other drugs are not legal. Called by dozens of slang names, from speed, to coke, from grass, to crack, to smack, and angel dust. They break down the mind and the body. There are a lot of people using those drugs in this country. And very few, if any, have solid information about the drugs they use. That leads to casualties, physical and emotional casualties throughout society. It's happened before in other cultures. Never in history, though, has substance abuse been as widespread as right now. And never before have so many different kinds of people been involved. How do we form our opinions about drugs? Where does our information about them come from? Legal drugs are heavily advertised and promoted. Such campaigns, while a natural aspect of competition, have succeeded in creating a sense that no matter what the problem, there's a substance that can solve it. Illegal drugs are promoted differently. Movies, records, and videos, for example, often treat them casually, many times with humor. This translates into a pervasive feeling that drugs are somehow okay, somehow positive, harmless. That feeling has nothing to do with sound information or what is real. And then there's word of mouth. One person passing misinformation about drugs on to another. Just because someone uses doesn't mean he or she knows anything about a drug, except how it makes someone feel. I'd sit there in my room drunk, so happy, but feeling so sorry for myself. I was wallowing my own self pity. And no matter how fun that is, it is just an escape. I mean, I didn't wanna face the fact that I wasn't happy. I loved feeling sorry for myself, and drinking just helps you so much. I weren't doing drugs, cuz you don't have to face that. I mean, when I stopped, I couldn't, I felt, I didn't know who I was. I mean, it's so easy just to get high and then act high. That's all you have to do, you don't have to show yourself. You don't have to grow, you don't have to change. Cuz you don't grow up when you're getting high. Cuz you don't act like yourself, you act like the drug you're on. The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates some 35 million Americans use illegal drugs. Few of them knew what they were putting in their bodies when they first decided to do drugs. Most still don't know. They don't know about the short and long term effects, or what's really in the drugs they take, or who made the drugs that they are consuming. The pharmacist basic education and most of the 74 colleges of pharmacy throughout the United States is a five year program leading to a bachelor's science degree in pharmacy. The federal government through a number of federal agencies, food and drug administration being one, and the drug enforcement administration being another, have the responsibility to make sure that drugs that are delivered to the pharmacies of this country and to the hospital pharmacies of this country are in fact not only legitimate, been produced legitimately, but are effective and safe. When somebody buys drugs on the street, they're essentially buying an unknown chemical, an unknown compound. The purity varies widely. Some of the cuts that are used in illegal drugs can range from milk powder to rat poison. Exactly how these drugs may affect the brain, affect other parts of the body, remain to be seen. Unfortunately, we see many people who do in fact overdose, who get bad reactions from drugs, who become addicted to them in short periods of time, to what extent these effects are due to the impurities as compared to the drug itself. One can only take a guess at it present. One thing is clear that using illegal drugs, putting these virtually unknown compounds into the human body, is nothing short of playing Russian roulette with your health and with your life. I wonder why youth even take drugs. Here we are buying something from somebody in the street that we generally don't know, who has prepared the drug in such a manner that it is not pure. It contains all kinds of impurities. And any taking of any drug at any given time, one can either get an overdose or severe poison, something that we call in medicine anaphylactoid shock, a very big name, where it is very difficult to revive the individual. So the first thing is that youth should never take anything that they don't know what it really is. And yet, they buy it in the street from an unknown person who has manufactured something in a clandestine way, generally in a makeshift laboratory. And they're totally unpure. Most all drugs bought on the street are totally unpure. Ill people treated with drugs ask questions about those drugs. Doctors are trained to give answers relating to risks, side effects, and potential dependency. But who answers questions about pot or coke? Angel dust, PCP, or crack? The users, they know what they've experienced, but not what a drug does in the human body, what it changes, breaks down, or causes to happen. If a kid were interested in cars and racing cars, he'd certainly want to get under the hood and understand something about engines and carburation. And one of the dangers that we have with kids that use chemicals, kids that use pot, is that they have a sense from having used it that they understand something about it. Because it's given them a feeling, they think they understand something about its chemistry or something about its effect on the body. They have no idea that it may affect their brain, their lungs, their reproductive system, their ability to fight infections. And most important, the way they think and the way they make judgments. You'll hear a kid say who's used a pot. Well, it makes me feel more at home on the road or in a car. And yet, tests in laboratories show that even experienced airline pilots using marijuana 24 hours later after their drug free cannot bring a plane in properly for a landing. So kids are often making a great mistake in thinking that they have sufficient information about a drug based on street use, street experience, or street gossip. The fact that drugs has reached almost every level of society has put younger and younger people in the position of having to decide about using drugs. A tough call when friends, acquaintances, and elders have decided to use. But whatever a person's age, that call should never be made on the basis of bad information. Taking drugs seriously is what it's all about, because the risks are so great. Can't see yourself in jail? OK, you don't have to be there to be a casualty. An athlete whose life revolves around drugs rather than ball is a casualty. The average person who is too busy getting high when they should have been learning to read and write properly is a casualty. Those who care more about drugs than family are casualty. People who drift aimlessly through life robbed by drugs of the opportunity to become equipped to meet society's demands are casualties. We don't need any more casualties. Starting to say no to drugs is one way of keeping their numbers from increasing. Saying no means both standing up and defining a personal value orientation and responding intelligently to correct information. It's not easy, but it can be done. It has to be done. We've seen what happens to individuals, to societies that involve themselves in illicit drug use. We feel we're in a very good position to go out, to talk to the members of our communities, to talk to our youth, to encourage them to a feeling of self-worth, feeling good about themselves, participating in sports, participating in school activities, in neighborhood activities, being proud of who they are. Police officers are doing this around the country, in major cities throughout the country. The police officers, many of whom who grew up in the same environment as the individuals who now feel this hopelessness, are now going back into the very classrooms in which they sat and are saying, hey, there can be a change in you, a change in your life without putting a foreign substance into your body. You can affect that change yourself by saying, yes, I can do it, and no, I do not need a foreign substance to make myself a better person. You have to have courage. Now nobody's going to give you courage. Nobody can say this is what courage is. This is what courage is not. Courage is something that you reach down here to find. And that's when you say no. And you'll have to say no several times, because most young people use drugs after they've said no four or five times. But it's a simple, straightforward approach. Say no. Well, one morning, I woke up and I was laying in my bed thinking. And I seen where my life was heading, which was nowhere. And I seen a few of my friends that I grew up with, who took the other route, the square route, as we were saying the street. And they were doing things for themselves, going to college, driving around in cars, and doing what was the right thing to do for a young man. And I had a brother who I used to get high with, who went to jail behind drugs, because he was also selling drugs. And he had very bad experiences in jail. He was put in solitary confinement. And he had to fight all the time. And all those things just hit me once, the emotional scene with my family, the changes I was put my mother through, the way society was looking at me. All of it just hit me at once. And I went through a lot of emotional changes behind that, too. And I just decided that it's time to get help, and it's time to do something for myself. Drug abuse is one of society's biggest problems. It's a disease that steals potential, destroys careers, wrecks families, and kills people. If not quickly, then slowly. But people don't have to use drugs like they have to breathe. There's a choice to be made, a decision. So who makes the right one? Who says no when there's curiosity or peer pressure or 100 other excuses to say yes? I think people with self-discipline do. I think people with strong, positive self-images do. I think people who have a realistic idea about their goals and objectives in life, they do. But most of all, I think people who know there are no quick fixes in this world do. Most of all, I think people willing to find out about drugs and then make a decision based on what they found out based on good, solid information wind up saying no. Those who do say no find themselves on a steadily growing team of members who understand how destructive these drugs are. Saying no to them makes so much sense. It's almost crazy to mention it. Still, it needs to be said. It needs to be said and mentioned and repeated until everyone's got the message, understands the message and acts on the message. When that happens, when decisions about drugs are based on facts, most of the pushers will disappear. It won't happen fast, not tomorrow or the next day, but it will happen. It will happen if people just continue to say no. Say no to drugs. Hi, I'm Kent Hervak of the Minnesota Twins. And remember, say no to drugs. Just say no to drugs. Stop before it kills you. Say no to drugs. I'm Roy White. And I'm Don Mattingly of the New York Yankees. Say no to drugs. Be self-confident and say no to drugs. Just say no! This is Tony Oliva from Minnesota Twins. Please say no to drugs.