Sergetalks Blog ~ The Official Blog of Serge LeClerc

According to a survey done by the Kaiser Family Foundation, American young people, eight to 18- 53 hours a week – more than a working day and more than the time these kids spend in school. Because most of them multitask, they manage to pack 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those seven hours and 38 minutes.

Those figures fit with Canadian statistics used by Serge LeClerc, former Montreal drug lord who, having rehabilitated himself, is an MLA, an author, and an eagerly sought after inspirational speaker. He spoke to high school students and to community members in Foam Lake recently.

He told the high school students that from kindergarten to Grade 12, kids spend 20,000 hours watching TV. During the same time, they spend 10,000 hours in the classroom. (more…)

“The secret of life,” Serge LeClerc said in Foam Lake recently, “is not the choice you make. It’s the choices you do not make.”

LeClerc would know. It was a choice that he did not make – to stay at school one Friday afternoon – that led to a brutally abusive training centre, crime, drug addiction, and, eventually, life as one of Canada’s major drug lords. Another choice he rejected allowed him to turn his life around.

LeClerc, now a Saskatchewan MLA, is the son of a Cree mother who was raped at 14. Unable to read or write, living in Toronto, she worked two dishwashing jobs with Sunday off. . “She was a very strong Christian who gave me a set of guidelines and an ethical certainty that I could follow. My identify was framed by the kids in the inner city who didn’t want to fight me because I was a talented boxer. I had talent, and I had mother’s faith.” (more…)

Just to recap some of the statistics of the plague of alcohol upon our modern day society and our young people:

Alcohol usage or misuse and alcohol related deaths are the number one killer of that same age bracket;

What numerous people do not realize is that many, if not most of the 50,000 cases of alcohol poisoning in the United States each year do not result from alcohol addiction, but rather from instance of alcohol abuse. Indeed, binge drinking, a type of alcohol abuse, leads to perhaps the majority of alcohol overdose cases that are reported each year. Obviously, many people are not aware of this information or about alcohol facts such as these.

While underage drinking is a factor in nearly in nearly half of all teen automobile crashes, the leading cause of death among teenagers. (more…)

As we looked at the mind meld by the alcohol industry via the media advertisements aim at young people to pick out a brand of beer or alcohol before they are old enough to drink, you must remember to juxtaposition this effort to the reality of the developmental life cycle and the creation of identity – and its importance for this age group. When you do, then the reasons that young people gave for drinking – and for being the heaviest drinking group of young people in our country’s history – give insight to the absolute effectiveness of the campaign by the alcohol industry.

Young men, before the legal age of being able to drink, gave as their number one reason for drinking; that when they got to a party where their friends were at that they didn’t want their friends to think they were a ‘geek’ or a ‘wimp’ – ‘not cool’. I want you think of it this way – young men on the way to manhood, gave as the number one reason that they drink something that taste like ‘horse-pee’ was so that their friends didn’t think they were ‘unmanly’ ……wonder where they got the idea that not drinking was unmanly? And the number one reason that girls gave; well it really was more like two reasons – 87% of teenage girls who drank below the legal age limit to drink said that they drank because their boy friend drank and 83% of the girls who said they didn’t drink had a boy friend who didn’t drink – and for the girls that drank – the highest number of teenage girls who drink in the history of North America – all below the legal age of drinking – they said that they did so because they were unsure of themselves; weren’t sure whether they were outgoing enough, pretty enough, smart enough ….. and that they needed a few drinks to let their real selves come out! (more…)