Mrs. Mary Marcuccio, Director of “Parents 4 a Change”, presented her family's personal story to grade ten students at Grasso Tech in an effort to stress the importance of making wise choices in life. She spoke about the consequences of casual drug use quickly leading to full-blown addiction. She focused most especially on the use of opiates. Mrs. Marcuccio informed students that heroin and other opiates have overtaken car accidents as the leading cause of death among the teen population. She described the new and dangerous growth in addiction among populations previously unaccustomed to heroin problems, such as her own town of Wallingford, Connecticut.

She stated that her son is an active addict and she allowed our students to know what it has been like to need to break relations with him because of his unwillingness to accept help and his behaviors such as stealing from his parents, violent confrontations, and constant lies. She said she tried to protect him from himself by keeping him home and finally blocking windows and doorways. She said she even had to have pictures hung in strange places on the walls of her house to cover the holes her son made in his rages to go out to get his drugs. She told of her calls to police and of how her husband and police tried to hold him from going out to the street. She described once finding him nearly dead in the bathroom. She said that if she had not heard the inner voice tell her that he had been quiet too long, he would not be alive. The emotional exhaustion of trying to get her son to accept help, which he did not choose to do, wore her out.

Other members of “Parents 4 a Change” have similar stories. Mrs. Marrcuccio told students about one father, who would, often, join her in presentations but was very ill now. He would describe his beautiful and very intelligent daughter who had become addicted. Mrs. Marcuccio spoke of how this family lost their wife and mother to cancer, which weighed heavily on all of them. She said that each daugther was given one piece of jewelry by the mother to remember her after she passed away.

The stories all seemed to have a profound effect on the students in attendance and will hopefully help them to make better choices the rest of their lives.