10
PEOPLE
ron cuff
using his flight experience to help prevent child drug use By Heather Young
R
on Cuff of Paso Robles spends part of his time in retirement volunteering with SafeLaunch, a nonprofit he founded with Janet Rowse and Mari Mender in 2010.
“I came to realize through [involvement]… with other nonprofit organizations … that almost everything I’ve done as a community volunteer, it always seems to lead back to drug addiction,” Cuff said. “The problem I was trying to solve always led back to drug addiction.” So the trio decided to go back where addiction begins—with children. Once addicted, Cuff said, treatment only works 10 percent of the time. Cuff said he doesn’t denigrate treatment, as it is important; however, treatment is extremely expensive and does affect the person’s friends and families. “If we can prevent it, it’s extremely effective,” Cuff said, adding that SafeLaunch’s goal is to stop or delay first exposure as long as possible. He described the first exposure they’re combating as the child’s first time ingesting the substance, which is usually alcohol or marijuana. “No one starts with heroin. Most people start at a very young age with one substance and move on to other substances.”
the opportunity to paint [their idea of prevention],” Cuff said. “I talk to them that their life is kind of like a flight: ‘If you want to have a successful flight, you train for it.’ … They see life has a lot of possibilities as long as you plan for it.” At the shows, children can sit in the airplane in addition to painting the outside. Originally, Cuff’s plane had stripes on it, but he removed them. Once they were removed, he said it looked like a blank canvas, so he decided to offer it as a way for children to be creative in thinking about prevention. “The other pilots think I’m crazy to let kids paint on my plane,” Cuff said. “The paint washes off … the point is for them to paint their version of a healthy, nondrug-addicted future.”
He said that the strategy of the last two to three decades of telling children to make good choices hasn’t been working.
Through the air shows, Cuff said he’s talked with parents, some of whom who have shared their stories of addiction.
“Children don’t always make a good choice and we can’t expect them to because their brains aren’t fully developed,” Cuff said.
“I talked to one parent who was exposed by a babysitter at age 7 and he’s in recovery. Another parent was exposed at age 8,” Cuff said. “You get exposed to an addictive substance at that age. ... We know that a 14-yearold is six times more receptive than an adult to become addicted.”
Currently, SafeLaunch is based in Santa Barbara and has traveled around the West Coast to air shows to bring their message of prevention to children and their parents. Cuff takes his white Cessna airplane to air shows. “We plug it as a static display and offer the kids
Children sitting in the cockpit during a SafeLaunch program. J A N U A R Y
2016
Journal PLUS
SafeLaunch focuses on children 8 to 12 years of age because Cuff said that those are the ages when most first active exposure happens. It’s like
A group of kids who painted Ron’s plane.