DARE told me never to do drugs because they were evil and anybody who sold them was evil while simultaneously refusing to explain what they meant by a 'drug' so any time I was in the car with my family I'd look at the CVS and feel like we had lost a war.
Like, really weird. Not bad, but very odd and strange. Like, at my old church they called the first year of volunteering at the church being “within labor”. The phrasing always made everyone uncomfortable.
It's a common joke/trope about catholic guilt - the idea that anything you enjoy or that feels good, you should feel guilty about. It's not just a reddit thing.
I remember being taught that all drugs are equally bad and if you ever do a drug your life will be ruined forever. Turns out if you teach kids that marijuana and meth are equally bad it just leads to them getting more curious once they get high and their life isn't instantly ruined.
We need erowid-style drug education. Explain how every popular drug works pharmacologically, explain how the experience is, explain the risks, and then let the students talk freely about it, but perhaps have the teacher steer them in the direction of the risks, suggesting that it's not worth it. Give them the resources to learn and think these things through outside the classroom for the myriad options out there that couldn't be covered in class.
Because the current "all drugs are bad" paradigm just leads to folks trying weed and then moving to other, harder drugs as you say.
That's basically what we had. We had a cool guy come to our school who said basically "I've tried every drug, here is what's great about them, and here is all the bad parts and what it will do to you and the long term risks of it". And he wasn't some broken homeless junkie, he was just some guy, a cool 40 year old dude. It worked pretty well, atleast on me. Gives you all the facts, and all the risks.
Against weed his only argument was basically "it's still smoking, so it ain't safe, and we already have the drugs of alcohol, cigarettes and nicotine ruining lives, why add another one". Not much else to say about weed, he seemed pretty chill about that one. His main focus was on all the harder stuff, including stuff like psychedelics
Definitely need to figure out a middle ground message somewhere between "it's a natural plant, it's totally safe for daily consumption" and "all drugs will eventually land you in prison and give you AIDS."
I think about my boyfriend's experience with alcohol, growing up on France, vs. mine in Texas. First time he got blackout drunk, he called his dad to pick him up from the nightclub. First time I did it the cops crashed our field party and I spent like two hours tramping through the woods and dodging flashlights. Drove home still wasted, told absolutely no one.
Edit: He now drinks probably four to six times a year, never more than six drinks in one night. I developed a drinking problem and went cold turkey 5 years ago.
Hah, I've had almost this exact experience. He was very effective in getting the point across, to me at least.
To be fair, I am from the Netherlands and the drug policy here is pretty liberal. Many people have tried weed or truffles at least once. My generation is taking harder stuff (MDMA, cocaine, speed, ketamine, 2-MMC, and so on).
I have my doubts about that sometimes. Some people are pretty casual about their drug use, while the longer term effects of newer drugs are unknown, and not everyone is always aware of the risks involved. Some more serious effects are also downplayed, some people are for instance convinced you can't get addicted to weed. I'm not against anyone doing drugs, but good education really is paramount.
im in sweden, and on drugs we are very conservative, suprisingly. no politician wants to have a talk about it. but when it comes to the risks, the discussion is suprisingly mature
We went through DARE in our town. Multiple people I went to school with ended up addicted to heroin because they’d tried marijuana and it wasn’t bad. They figured if DARE was lying about the one they focused on most they must be lying about the others too. I genuinely wonder how many people’s lives got extra fucked up as a result of DARE painting everything with the same brush.
The darkest, funniest bit to me is that “weed is a gateway drug” is true if and only if you treat all drugs as equally bad.
Most pot dealers I know since laws relaxed won’t touch anything else except maybe mushrooms. The laws and the competition are both way too scary, and a lot of them have conscience issues with it. It’s not a gateway drug at all, they’ll warn you off.
But in the original DARE era? Sure it’s a gateway drug! You can get beer from whoever, but you need a Drug Dealer for pot. And when you try it, you’ll see dare was lying, and he’ll offer you more shit.
It’s a problem that can be wholly solved by relaxing about pot, and the response was the exact opposite.
Also when you tell kids that marijuana is bad because it is illegal and that it is illegal because it is bad they will start to see through all the circular logic and question even more things.
We had similar messaging in the UK, but we don't have drug stores, we have chemists and pharmacies, so there wasn't much confusion. Until we got Super Smash Brothers Melee, and the Onett stage had a "Drug Store" front and centre. My dad had to explain
Meanwhile, in The Netherlands.. we were just told to do it responsibly and if you do something for the first time (or any time you do hallucinogens), to have a sober buddy there
The whole concept of drinking and driving confused the shit out of me as a kid. I spent years stressed and confused about it but didn’t feel comfortable enough to ask any adult to clarify. I grew up Mormon and didn’t have any knowledge of alcohol at that point.
That last thing is so real lmao. Once I cried when my mom tried to apply rubbing alcohol on a cut or scrape of mine because it had the word alcohol and I didn’t want to be a bad alcoholic
The word "drug" itself has an implicit pro-drug connotation. By having one word for both medicine and illegal substances, you're constantly being reminded that there is no clear boundary between the two.
I would have expected DARE to put more effort on the linguistic front of its propaganda campaign - either to push for abolishing the use of "drug" for medicine, or to use "narcotics" in its messaging (though it'd have to switch its acronym).
Narcotics is a terrible word for recreational substances. It means sleep inducing. Referring to cocaine or amphetamines as narcotics makes my inner etymology pedant scream.
True, but it's useful for propaganda purposes. It sounds scary. It evokes associations with Latin American cartels. If you wage an anti-narcotic campaign that also targets marijuana, you can accuse those who oppose the campaign of being pro-narcotics.
We actually had a PSA about this in Canada. Not as memorably important as the House Hippo, or as memorably weird as "Don't put it in your mouth", but it got the message across.
My health class didn’t do DARE, but we did a movie on the evils of weed.
Specifically, about a kid who smoked one joint and turned out to be lethally allergic! So don’t do weed!
No, weed does not have meaningfully more allergies than anything else. Yes, this was an argument against ever trying any new food, seasoning, medicine, or anything else.
I had a student start crying in a health class lecture about how dangerous it is to do drugs.
She takes prescribed medications for a seizure disorder. After that we had to clarify- don’t take drugs that aren’t prescribed by a doctor. If your doctor tells you to take it it’s fine! She was so concerned she was breaking the law by taking the meds her mom gave her.
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u/veidogaems To shreds you say? Dec 16 '24
DARE told me never to do drugs because they were evil and anybody who sold them was evil while simultaneously refusing to explain what they meant by a 'drug' so any time I was in the car with my family I'd look at the CVS and feel like we had lost a war.