It’s clear that more adults, including physicians, need further education about the causes and consequences of addiction, but it may be even more important to educate our children before they make decisions that can end up tearing apart their entire lives. Drug education in schools is mandatory and ongoing, but it’s clearly inadequate, for much the same reasons that health and sex education standards are inadequate.
The approach most schools take to drug education is a unilateral, completely straightforward “Just say no!” campaign. They struggle to paint all use of any substance, even one sip of alcohol or one cigarette, as a horrifying and potentially lethal act of self-destruction. While it’s true that beginning to drink or smoke at a young age can have horrible long-term effects on health, painting the situation with such a broad brush just sets education up for failure, because it creates an illusion that can’t be maintained. Kids — especially pre-teens and teenagers, who are the target of most drug education — are immature, but they aren’t stupid. They will see adults having a drink, or smoking, in their everyday lives. They may see their friends trying a beer or a cigarette, and when that adult or that friend doesn’t immediately crash a car, vomit, or suffer some other horrible comeuppance, the kid who has been through that style of drug education will conclude that they have been lied to. They will also realize, possibly just by going home in the afternoons, that not all people who are addicted to substances are bad, dirty people. By refusing to deal with any of the nuance or complication of addiction, much of drug education sets itself up as a lie — a lie that will be easily disproven. And the worst thing is that, once a kid has realized that official education sources may exaggerate or lie, that kid may never trust an official source of education again. Any future attempts to correct the bad drug education will fall on deaf ears.
If we are going to have any hope of reaching kids, we must show them the basic respect they deserve, and tell them the truth. They have to understand that a large number of people want to get high, or feel an altered state of consciousness, and that there are safe ways to do it — drinking in moderation with friends (without driving afterwards), for example. Kids need to know that some things, like marijuana, are almost infinitely safer than others — like the “legal” marijuana analogues that use things like toxic bath salts and tar, and can cause seizures.
The drug education standards prevalent today are not strictly “education”, in my opinion. Education is a process designed to give people true and useful information with which they can make decisions and keep themselves safe. The statistics and medical consequences discussed in drug education are certainly true, but they are not presented in the context of giving useful information; they are presented in the context of propaganda and scare tactics. While I understand the deep concern and fear for the safety of children that is behind this style of teaching, I also feel certain that it does not work, nor will it ever work, the way it was intended. Giving students information you swear is true, which will be contradicted by their real-world experience, will only set them up for lifetime distrust of education. It may also lead to them throwing out the legitimate warnings along with the trumped-up fear tactics, and put them in a worse position than before.
Drug education, like health and sex education and all other important topics, must be discussed with children in a way that is serious and straightforward, but it must also take into account the complexities that that child will face as they attempt to make their way in a nuanced adult world. “Just say no” has some valuable aspects to it as a campaign, and I would certainly rather that no one under legal age used any substances at all, but a lack of proper education will only lead to more addicted people living more self-destructive lives.