DARE
From Facebook. I was replying to a mother who was just saying how her kid just graduated DARE.
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I remember going through DARE. We always joked that it meant "Drugs Are Really Excellent".
In all seriousness though, the only things I took away from DARE were the variety of drugs (I had no idea before DARE) And that they are all bad. I really never understood the prevention aspect because there was no fear. At that age, kids do not fear the law. So telling them that drugs are illegal is meaningless.
The thing in life that has actually caused me to avoid drugs was that one of my friends had a little sister who got hooked on crack. Crack is an addiction that a human physically can not break. She will spend the rest of her days in and out of rehab, miserable because she craves it. It's an addiction so strong that a human will do inhuman things to get it. Life and family are meaningless to it. When I was mature enough to fully understand the horror of what she'd done to her life, that's when I decided not to try drugs. Before that, I'd only been avoiding them because an adult told me to.
I think kids are too protected to see, or understand, what misery that girl got into. To them, it's just the "boogie monster": something that we say they should be afraid of. Since we raise kids not to be afraid of "Boogie Monsters", they learn the skills early on to hide, or ignore their fears. That gives them the ability to brush off our warnings about drugs as meaningless.
The part, that I think, the DARE program really focused best on is the mechanism. That girl started by smoking at the bus stop. Underage, Her and her girlfriend would huddle up with stolen cigarettes, thinking they were cool. From there its easy to scale up to pot (Huge underground industry in Michigan, and mostly harmless until abused), and then to the drugs that cause the real high, and the real damage. DARE goes through that process with the kids, identifying smoking and drinking as 'gateway drugs'. Habits that make it easy for a person to take the next step into the really dangerous drugs. I thought knowing the mechanism was helpful in understanding why even seemingly harmless substances were bad.
Those are my thoughts.
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Y'know, in retrospect, I wonder if the DARE program puts pressure on parents to do their part in teaching that drugs are bad. I think that it scares me that a parent might assume that since the program teaches drug prevention, they don't have to.
But the schools teach math so they don't have too...
Or do they? I believe that schools are a tool for standardizing education. They make sure that all students learn the same level of material by the same age. The goal is that every high school grad is at least par. I think the High school diploma is supposed to be the certification of at least that.
I don't think the rest of the world shares this belief.
And since I'm writing, I want to comment on the Pot industry in Michigan. When you look around a crowded room, I can guarantee that there is at least 1 person who could get you a bag of weed within the hour. I can say that because I will bet that in any Michigan crowd 1 in 4 people has tried pot. Of those, I think 1 in 4 smokes regularly. So 1 in 8 people should be able to just flip open their phone and order some up.
What makes me believe this is the stupid high number of regular people who do regularly smoke. People who we do not think of as 'bad people'. I stood in my parents living room and pointed to the houses around them:
"This one is chain smokers, so they've likely tried it in their lives."
"They throw regular 'get drunk' parties. While not likely regular, weed isn't to hard to imagine once in a while"
"When the previous owner moved out of that house, they found grow lamps in a hidden attic in his house, and he was an ok guy."
"That family is good people, but their son is very likely."
"Two houses down, the husband shows all the signs of that kind of lifestyle, but with a wife like that, he's probably not a regular smoker"
"3 houses up, that family are known burnouts. Pot is a given, and probably not the worst thing that goes on regularly"
My parents are in a good neighbor hood. None of these people I pointed at are bad people. Just plain old Joes who like a little weed when they relax.
I dunno. I don't smoke weed, and never have. I have my own reasons. But the more I look around, the more I think that weed is like alcohol: harmless when used responsibly.