Comment by perardi
5 years ago
Bit of a tangential rant: meth is actually truly really bad, and I wish our drug education growing up hadn’t painted this nebulous concept of “drugs”, because there’s gradations of harm.
I’m approaching 40. (Ugh, I hate to admit that.) I grew up during the D.A.R.E. era. Just Say No. Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. “Drugs” were this boogeyman, and whatever they were, they would turn you into a junkie instantly.
I have no idea how you’d study this, as I think this was a pretty much cross-cultural message, but I wonder what would have happened if we could have educated teenagers that, well, “we know you’re going to do drugs, they all have side effects, but some are not that bad, and some will absolutely ruin you.”
Because: I have done a lot drugs in my 30s. Pretty much the full club drug buffet, with the exception of meth and opiates. (Also never smoked a cigarette yet.) And you know what? There are varying degrees of bad. There’s this jaded sense that you build up, that you’re a bit bitter that you wasted quite a lot of your childhood education in D.A.R.E. I wonder if we could have possibly successfully pulled off harm reduction education in drugs, and given people a better set of mental tools to understand what drugs are truly bad, namely meth and opiates, and which drugs are quite honestly far less deleterious than vodka. (You cannot tell me, with a straight face, that weed is physically and socially more harmful than drinking.)
D.A.R.E. did a great job of teaching us that any drug user has made a conscious choice toward moral failure. Couple that with knowledge of which groups were most heavily impacted by the drug epidemics of the 1980s and you can see an esoteric goal for D.A.R.E.
"D.A.R.E. did a great job of teaching us that any drug user has made a conscious choice toward moral failure."
I don't think it did this. I'm in my early 40's and grew up with DARE. When we were younger, they really leaned into the danger factor and pretty much said you'll hurt everyone you know.
And then, you realize they are liars. I didn't have to actually do drugs to see that. Why would you learn that is a moral failure from lies? I didn't even worry about those sorts of things when I was a preteen/young teen, honestly.
Meth was legal until the 70s, society functioned. The current problem is another side effect of the war on drugs
https://www.history.com/topics/crime/history-of-meth
> with the exception of meth and opiates
That's like saying "I did a lot of drugs, except the ones that _really_ fuck you up". 100K people will die in the US this year from hard drug overdoses. 93K died last year. This also ignores the fact that several times the number are circling down the societal shitter due to their addiction.
That's not to disagree that e.g. MJ is less dangerous than alcohol when consumed in moderation (although it doesn't have the same effect, so realistically people will just consume both, hopefully not simultaneously).
But don't forget the audience: there's a number of folks on this site who think that heroin and meth should be legal, and freely available, and they will read your comment with that bias in mind. I'd much rather have the old DARE bullshit than allow this to happen.
> heroin and meth should be legal, and freely available, and they will read your comment with that bias in mind. I'd much rather have the old DARE bullshit than allow this to happen.
Why? Do you think somehow things would be worse with legal, controlled drugs?
What should happen when someone violates the legal protocols in which they're controlled?
Meth is already legal, in actuality. It's just controlled in production and distribution and only available by prescription. There are millions in America taking legal meth right now.
5 replies →
Contemporary social policy as a whole appears to be a cycle of reaction and hysteria. There's very little substance to this process, in the form of empiricism or evidenced-based feedback. This cycle appears to be a by-product of our modern information mediums. I think that generations prior to ours (I too am approaching 40) weren't as vulnerable to the whims of society's most easily frightened and manipulated members. I think the only solution is to vote with our feet, and leave the hysterics behind. I suspect this process is well underway, now that the more educated members of society have the ability to work from home.