Awareness-raising in schools against alcohol and drugs and driving

Photo Sophie Side
Viky Coulombe and her daughter, Koryn testify to the damage of the alcohol and drug driving in the framework of the program MADD Canada’s school assembly.

Sophie Side

Thursday, 19 October 2017 17:17

UPDATE
Friday, 20 October, 2017 09:36

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The mother and sister of Derek Bolduc Coulombe, a young Beauceron, who died the victim of a hit in 2015, deliver a poignant testimonial in a video that made the rounds of schools to educate young people about the consequences of driving with impaired abilities.

“It’s like a part of you that goes away. It is like […] a wound that remains open, but no longer bleeding. It just remains there, the worse it hurts. Really evil”, expresses with emotion Koryn, age 16, who must learn to live without his “big brother”, which has not survived a violent collision with Scott, in August 2015.

The school program for MADD Canada – mothers against drunk driving, was arrested Thursday at the high school of Koryn at Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, where some 300 students of the fourth secondary attended the presentation of a short film aiming to reflect on the consequences of driving while intoxicated or under the influence of cannabis.

Students shaken

The last segment of the short film, which includes in particular the testimony of the mother and the sister of Dereck, was for the students a particular character, as many of them knew each other from near or from afar the victim and her family.

Tears have been shed. Some have even had to leave the room, too excited.

“”I love you”, it is the last word that I said to him,” in the video Viky Coulombe, the mother of the boy of 19 years.

“[When the doctor I learned of his death], I fell on both knees on the ground. […] I had a intense heat in me… I thought not”, she says with difficulty.

She recalls in the short film that hit 31-year-old struck the car in which her son was impaired and was driving at 130 km/h in a zone of 50 km/h.

“It can happen to anyone”

Ms. Coulombe and her daughter did not hesitate to participate in this initiative of MADD Canada.

“It was necessary to pass the message. We do it for him. It is necessary to make prevention in order to not make it happen again,” pointed out the mother of Derek after viewing.

This last, eyes filling with tears, admits to “learn to live again all the days” since that fateful day.

“I wanted the world to know that it can happen to anyone,” adds his daughter, Koryn. I know [people] who smoke just a little joint and take their tank. But you see, it only happens maybe not the first five times [an accident], but it can happen the sixth time,” explains the teenager.

The program MADD Canada visit throughout the school year hundreds of secondary schools in the country. A million young people will thus be reached by June.

IMPAIRED DRIVING AMONG YOUNG PEOPLE

ROAD COLLISIONS:

• Leading cause of death among young people aged 16 to 25 years old
• In about half the cases, alcohol and/or drugs are a factor

Young people from 16 to 25 years accounted for 33.4 per cent* of deaths from alcohol-related road in Canada (2010)

A driver in four canadians aged 16 to 24 years who lost his life in an accident had a positive screening test for marijuana.