His memories are addled, but the young member of Cocaine Anonymous can just about recall his formal drug education. When he was about 11, he says, a police officer made several visits to his school to give warning of the dangers posed by illicit substances. Although he remembers thinking the cop was “something of a Dudley-Do-Right”, he agreed with him that drugs were best avoided. He recalls no further lessons. By his late teens he was addicted to crack cocaine and methamphetamine.
By far the best way of reducing the harm that drugs can do is to convince people not to take them. Spraying crops, seizing shipments and arresting drug dealers can drive up prices and create temporary shortages. But it does not stop drug use. Addicts simply pay more for crummier products or switch to other, often more harmful substances.
In the late 1980s cocaine-taking fell steeply among class XII pupils — that is, 17 and 18-year-olds — according to the University of Michigan’s long-running Monitoring the Future survey. Those teenagers reported that the drug was more available than ever. They had simply decided not to take it on the grounds that it was harmful. The same thing happened with ecstasy earlier in this decade. Given this strong link between perceptions of harm and use, it is a bad sign that attitudes to cocaine are becoming rather relaxed.
Until recently the dominant approach was Drug Avoidance Resistance Education (DARE), a programme developed in Los Angeles in 1983 and quickly exported to the rest of America. Cops would arrive in schools, sometimes driving cars confiscated from drug-dealers, and tell 11 and 12-year-olds about the dangers of illicit substances. They drew little or no distinction between marijuana and methamphetamine. Teachers liked DARE because they felt uncomfortable tackling the topic themselves, and because they got a break. Parents liked it because they felt their children would listen to police officers.
Unfortunately, they did not. A string of academic studies labeled DARE pointless at best. Some academics — and former drug-takers — argue that efforts to scare young children about drugs that they have no knowledge of, are actually counter-productive.
The new approach to drug education, reflected in the remodeled DARE, is more oblique. By means of role-playing, cops and teachers try to give children the confidence to resist pressures of all kinds, from drugs to internet bullying. Rather than telling children that drugs are dangerous, teachers assure them that they are rare. Drugs are no longer treated as a unique, self-contained threat — which indeed they are often not. “Kids do not normally walk in with only a drug problem,” says Lori Vollandt, who coordinates health programmes in Los Angeles’ schools.
The new programmes are mostly intended to reduce alcohol, marijuana and tobacco use, and are evaluated in those terms. There is a good reason for that. Because they are so widespread, the total harm caused to teenagers by alcohol and tobacco is much greater than the total harm caused by harder drugs.
Even greater success has been achieved against tobacco. Since the mid-1990s, the proportion of class XII pupils who believe smoking a packet or two of cigarettes a day carries a great risk has risen by about ten percentage points. Regular puffing on cigarettes is now thought much more dangerous than occasionally smoking crack.
There are several reasons for this. Hollywood has virtually stopped glamourising cigarettes. Executives have been shamed and smokers ostracised. But a big reason is that the people who create anti-tobacco ads have refined their messages. They now know, for example, that warnings about long-term health effects do not scare teenagers. The long-term is too far off. Pointing out that second-hand smoke can harm babies turns out to work. So do ads suggesting that non-smokers are more popular.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)