[Serious] My high schooler worked at a fast food joint. Recently he encountered one of his underage coworkers under the influence of meth, which she said was given by management. What to do?
[Serious] My high schooler worked at a fast food joint. Recently he encountered one of his underage coworkers under the influence of meth, which she said was given by management. What to do?
My son is afraid of reporting this to police because many of his friends work there, and he's afraid of retaliation at school for being a "snitch". This is not the first time he's witnessed something very wrong and had to report it, that time to police, and he was targeted at school both physically and just with asshole kids treating him the way they do (while also influencing others).
Management made up an excuse and fired my son after it became apparent that he knew about the meth situation and was not ok with it.
He does want corporate to know all of this and take action, so we plan to report it to them.
Part of the trouble is this: My SO's daughter had a similar situation at another fast food joint, it was reported to corporate, and the response was basically "we can't do anything because that location is a franchise". The problem manager in that instance was promoted soon afterward.
I'm not sure if my son's restaurant is corporate owned or franchise. If it's a franchise as I fear, and corporate will take no action, what recourse can we take without police?
I'm super pissed my son was exposed to this and I'm concerned for the girl that informed him, not to mention the other employees. This obviously cannot stand, but I also don't want to ruin my son's social life over it. I remember being a high schooler, it's hard enough without being targeted by jerks.
EDIT: Thank you for all the replies. I plan to wait awhile to give my son some distance, then contact police. To all who said we live in a broken place, you're right, and if we could move immediately we would. It helps to get outside perspectives on stuff like this, and I appreciate all your replies.
Also fuck Spez!
So, I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but drugs aren't the major problem here. We have presumably an adult male giving hard drugs to an underage female.
This could easily be a situation where management is grooming this poor girl so they can rape her. Police need to be notified ASAP.
Your son's high school buddies are not more important than the safety of a child.
Hell, depending on your state you might have a legal obligation to report this to the police.
Yo if a manager is giving their children workers meth that is 1000% a police report and if your son gets punished that sounds to me like an easy lawsuit. Please for the love of God report this, the kid is probably already fucked for life but this manager could be using their position to get kids hooked on drugs so that they can do pedo shit. Someone has to say something.
Even without any ulterior motives, meth destroys lives. Permanently. I have friends who had the tiger by the tail in high school, got addicted to meth, and spent the last 30 years bouncing in and out of prison and insane asylums. Report that motherfucker immediately! He's destroying lives, families, and communities.
Can confirm, my sister is addicted to it, she's lost both of her kids, the youngest is now in the permanent custody of my mother.
Meth is absolutely crazy, my sister fucking bit me like a feral animal, she also thinks she's a god and thinks it's okay to walk around ass naked in the streets. When I said 'what if a kid sees you' she said the kid would be a weirdo for looking 🤦
Don't do meth.
I think there's a couple of nested problems. The first problem is a manager is giving employees meth, which could have been your son, if not now then maybe one day. You know what to do about this, but it's nested within another problem, which is how to do that without alienating your son.
So talk to your son about what bothers him about what happened and what he wants to do about it. Then, after he talks, tell him how it made you feel and what you want to do about it. Ask him if that's something he would like to do, have help with, or have you do for him.
You're asking the right questions, but I think you're asking the wrong people.
Report it to the police, corporate and consider talking to your local news. Make sure school admin is aware as well. If you can shift them to different schools (i know not always possible) do so.
My usual response to this kind of thing is to get louder not quieter, that said, I'm also able to put on an angry enough face to make people cross the road which is not a power everyone has.
Go with your comfort level but I would urge reporting to the police and doing what you can to get out of what sounds like broken area.
oh angry
I'm going to be an asshole here but hopefully it adds perspective. Do you care if the girl dies of a drug overdose, or that she may be getting targeted with grooming by a manager for other reasons? If you do, you report it. If you don't then just live your life and turn a blind eye. There is no in between. Hopfully nothing happens to the girl that you could have prevented.
I think it's worth being called a snitch to help stop a young girl from being abused.
Yeah, a manager giving their underaged employee drugs (especially meth) is nothing short of abuse. We're not talking about a boss giving their adult coworker some drugs, it's a kid.
You know who have short memories? Teenagers and drug users. You know who constantly have drama in their lives? Yep, teenagers and drug users.
If you decide to take action, wait three weeks and submit the complaint anonymously. Every police force has an anonymous tip line. Don’t get too specific like saying “we saw X manager give U employee meth on date”. Say that you witnessed management distributing drugs to minors and hang up.
With the passage of time. Your son will presumably be in a new job and the prior one will have long forgotten him due to high turnover. You can do something while still protecting your son. Just be sure he never, ever, let’s anyone know that you/he submitted the anonymous complaint.
This route appeals most to me. My first instinct was to contact the police immediately for the well-being of the girl and others, but then my son made a strong case for the retaliation he expects at school. To add to that he's already hesitant to seek help for things, always has been, and I worry that taking action he doesn't want will make him clam up even more.
So waiting awhile is a good plan, and I can probably get him onboard in that time. I'd like to be more proactive in helping the girl, so that bothers me, but since I'm forced to choose I have to look out for my boy.
Thank you for this idea. I wish you all the best in life.
No offense but if the people at your son's school are so disgusting that they'd retaliate for him reporting an underage girl's abuse then I would consider taking him out of that school anyway. I cannot imagine anyone at the school I went to when I was his age being that depraved, and I hated most of my schoolmates so I don't say that easily. That must be a school full of extra shitty kids that you don't want your son to be around.
Tell your son that not reporting this to police could put that girl's life in danger. He might be bullied at school, but she might end up dead. If he is so opposed to asking for help to the point of letting something like this continue then he could possibly use a few visits to a counselor to help him with that because it's an extremely unhealthy mindset to have. Imagine if it was HIM in her position, what would you want one of his older coworkers to do in that situation? Think very hard about that scenario and how it would make you feel.
There is no proper age for meth. 😱
Police, corporate, news, and raise hell on social media.
Meth? This ain't no small thing. Save anyone from meth addiction and that is a good thing.
Corporate can defranchise them. So raising this on social media would work.
I'm pretty sure regardless of anything else...
Help your son look for a new job. This is not an environment I would be fostering. Help him find a more suitable place to be.
The rest of it, you may still have trouble deciding what to do, but I don't think it matters nearly as much as helping to find or create a better environment for him to work in.
If there's retaliation I'd ask myself if I'd be ok with my son being raised in a town where meth usage is not only normalized but trying to stop it is stigmatized. I already know the answer to that question, hell no.
Think, if his friends are mad at him for snitching, what will they be doing in the future, if not are already doing now? They'll be experimenting with meth and as they get older and your son will probably get pressured into it to.
I don't think them being teenagers is an excuse. My friends tried plenty of drugs, weed, ecstacy, peyote, cocaine. Never fucking meth.
I say, alert the authorities and watch what happens. If the response is negative then you don't want to live in that shit hole anyways. I know, easier said than done, but this is your kids future were talking about and you don't want them in a town that will get them sucked into meth.
Your son needs to find a different job. That sounds like a really bad working environment. There are plenty of other fast food restaurants that don’t have meth problems. And if there aren’t in your area, find something else to do.
Second paragraph said the son was fired.
Retaliatory firing for something as illegal as that sounds like a free couple million dollars, before lawyer expenses of course.
Probably more like a couple thousand dollars unless a judge hits someone with some huge punitive fines. The lost income for a high schooler in a part-time minimum wage job isn't great. BUT fines from places like DOL or the state could rack up...it's just probably not going to end up as a big payday.
It's a tough choice between ruining your kids social and school life for a few years or letting the lives of many kids be thrown down the toilet because of a meth addiction.
I know that you want to protect you and yours but, morally, you have to do something to make this stop. As others have said, go to the police, the school/s and the local news and make as big of a stink over this as you can, those managers need to go to jail and those kids need to be rescued from life destroying consequences of the actions of adults that should fucking well know better.
Have a talk with your kid and see what they think should be done and put a plan in place for them to be supported in the aftermath and even consider moving home if that is at all a viable option for you.
I don’t know what you want to hear. You seem to understand the right thing to do and the potential consequences. There’s no easy way here but I know the decisions I’d be able to best sleep at night having made. When it comes to kids safety and well-being, helping a kid on meth takes precedence over potential reputation damage.
Another way to look at it… isn’t giving drugs to ”underage” people (children) pretty clearly child abuse, and required to be reported?
Call up your local news station and newspaper, offer them the story. If they turn you down, call up another one.
You call the fucking feds and report that shit. You do not fuck around with meth.
the poor girl potentially having legal issues come of this is not a good outcome. getting the cops involved rarely creates a net good.
Yeah, should totally ignore it and let her overdose or get raped by the guy that gave her the drugs. That's way better then getting the cops involved.
Legal trouble is better than mesh addiction.
Other kids' trouble is better than own kids' trouble.
Stopping substance abuse is better than not stopping it.
Stopping underage grooming is better than not stopping it.
...honestly I don't agree with "that poor girl getting in trouble" is worse than what is going on right now.
So I don't know if you're in the US but if you are all it takes is one anonymous phone call to have the doors busted down at every address you give them.
So your son is a snitch but doesn't want the consequences of snitching? Im sorry, but you don't get to be a rat without pissing people off. Its life.
The people he's snitching on and being ostracized by are a bunch of degenerates anyway. I understand why he's scared but I think the right thing to do would be for him to come forward with it. Why worry about the opinions of methheads? Of course, I'm not gonna hold it against him if he keeps quiet. It takes an abnormal amount of courage to stand up to the masses, and I don't think most people in this comment section would have that courage in his situation.
Yeah, let the girl OD or get raped, far better then doing the right thing.
You should teach your son to mind his own business - his life will be easier going forward because of it.
Virtually all restaurants have drug users. You're not going to stop a systemic problem by trying to narc to the police or corporate. The owners of the restaurant, the people who actually have hiring abilities, desperately need warm bodies and they'll more or less take anyone. I would never let a child of mine work at a restaurant. Have them volunteer at an animal shelter or something.
Assuming the police do anything at all, you're looking at criminal charges for someone who will likely be replaced by someone else willing to do the same thing. Potentially even the young teen might get charges out of it.
Is that really helping anyone? If the teen is willing to take meth in the first place, that's the real issue that needs to be addressed. She will just find someone else to get it from- that shit is rampant. I understand that meth is a terrible thing (I've been through heroin addiction myself, been clean 6+ years by now). But sometimes we just have to accept we can't regulate everyone's life without risking potentially worse consequences by doing so.
If you really want to help then you, the adult, should talk to this young girl who is using meth. Either talk to her or talk to her parents. Tell her what she's doing is dangerous and she should get help.
Beyond that, what else can you do?
I mean, can you really not see a difference between adults using drugs in the workplace and adults in a position of power giving children dangerous drugs?
The question is "what should you do about it" not "should this be happening"
Instead of trying to prevent a teen from acquiring drugs, you should raise a healthy teen that doesn't want to use drugs. If she is drug-seeking, you could arrest the adult in this scenario and her life would not fundamentally change. It's easier to get drugs as a teenager than it is to get alcohol.
So the crime of giving meth to a teenager. Ok, that definitely deserves a prison sentence. So let's call the police. But we have to look at the chances of
A) the police doing anything at all
B) the police doing a cursory investigation which reveals nothing and nothing comes from it
C) b) but with everyone at work knowing OP's son called the cops
D) police somehow find enough evidence or probable cause required to arrest him (unlikely)
E) d) but with everyone at work knowing OP's son called the cops
We could go all day, but having experience with calling the police... they won't do anything. Even if they do a small investigation the real risk is retaliation against the son.
That is much more likely outcome than the young teen improving her life and stopping the use of meth.
You see what I mean? I am not condoning the adult that is feeding drugs to a child. I'm just saying in a game theory sense the best move is not to play.
Yknow, I would almost agree with you if adults weren't giving children fucking meth
Also, think about why an adult is giving a child girl meth. It's not fucking good.
Maybe I should work spell it out for the thread OP since he seems like an idiot. Rape at a minimum, and very possible human trafficking.
Yeah far better to let some girl OD or get raped by the guy giving her the drugs then to do the right thing.
.