Asymmetrical Information

I think there's a role for neuroscience to play here. If only we could determine the brain chemistries for which Jane's final prescription would be safe and useful and for whom it would be a death sentence.

Laura's account is right on. I remember finding out that our grade-school kids were convinced their mother was a criminal because she was forever "drinking and driving"--drinking Coke, that is. :-)

You really can't tell kids anything worthwhile. My of them will try something at least once. They will either like it or not. In our family my sister and I drink and have done drugs. My parents always had a bar. But my nephew, my sisters kid, who is eighteen shows no interest in any drug or drink. Not in reponse to usso much as he just is not the least bit curious.

The body/mind is a strange thing.

Growing up I did all the usual stuff. A little grass and, later, coke. But it never consumed me and, eventually, as Jane says, I got tired of it and stopped.

However, when I was 20, my gall bladder ruptured and I was in the hospital for 10 days. My surgury was not "normal". Usually, there is a small incision scar when your done, but there was quite alot of cleaning up to do in my case and the surgeon cut through my abdominal muscles. I woke up when they were moving me from gurney to bed and I screamed in pain.

My point in the above, gross story is they gave me demerol for the pain and, if I'd been laid up much longer than I was, I'm sure I would have gained a dependency. Wonderful stuff, demerol, but I think what did it for me was that I absolutely had to have it for the pain for a few days. All the stuff I did as a kid was "fun". This was necessary. I think it was soon after that when I stopped doing any drugs (save beer, of course) at all. Guess I got scared and I just told myself I was tired of it. Weird.

Russ

"And frankly, if I were diagnosed with a terminal disease today, the first damn thing I'd do is buy a pack of Camel Lights."

Me, too, except it would be Marlboro Lights.

What schools should be teaching them is what TO do not what NOT to do. They should be teaching them they have control over their lives. They should be teaching them how to exercise that control over their lives, be in their studies, eating and drinking habits or sexual activities.

They should not be teaching how their parents should act, that is public policy interference not education.

"So DARE's message is not honest. But what would be a good honest message to send? 'Go try a bunch of these addictive substances, and learn which ones you can't walk away from. Then quit those, but it's okay to keep doing the others.'"

Which is, of course, a perfectly ridiculous message. I'll agree that DARE's message, and the message of similar organizations, are probably far from perfectly helpful or even wise--as I wrote on Laura's blog, saying "all addiction bad!" without providing a good why is going to result in a lot of kids eventually finding out that not all addictions are equal, deciding the whole message is bunk, and giving in to all that anxious energy you describe. But given that anxious energy can be manifest in numerous ways, and some are plainly more damaging than others, and everyone is concerned with people acting as responsibly as possible (even if they don't agree about the particulars of that response), why not promote baseline messages like DARE's, so that at least those who are genuinely concerned about which addictions their kids bring into their lives have something general and public to back up the distinctions--the "whys"--they want to introduce? It's kind of like an education which teaches children "all war bad!" Which is, obviously, also somewhat wrong. But at least it frames the issue, provides some moral infrastructure that can be later tailored by involved parents and others. (And if that tailoring fails and the kids just go the anxious energy route...well, were they likely to act more responsibly in absence of these early messages?)

The surest way to get me to do something when I was a teenager was to tell me not to do it because it was wrong or bad for me. Programs like DARE seem to be self-defeating in their stated purpose.

Hyper-scare never works and is usually counter-productive. In Ohio, for a very long time there was a movie they showed in Driver's Ed called something like 'Signal 30.' It was made in the early 60s and showed really bad accidents caused by drinking and driving. When it was over, the instructor would say, "Don't let this happen to you!"

The problem was we all knew tons of people who got liquored up and drove on a regular basis.

I also knew babysitters who smoked weed and DIDN'T put the baby in the oven and the turkey in the crib. (A very popular urban legend from the 70s)

Point is: When you tell a kid that if he does action A, then result B will occur and it doesn't, then they lose faith in your entire argument. If Jane started every post by claiming there are millions to be made in bamboo, how much faith do you put to any other economic points that she tries to make?

DARE and MADD have always overplayed their hands.

Reagan Fan,

Can you tell me how to get in on this bamboo thingie?

How about the radical proposal that we not have our schools send any "message" to our children with regard to whether or not they should use drugs, but simply provide them with accurate information as to what is known about both the risks and benefits of various substances? If you present it to them as a decision they need to make for themselves, I think they are more likely to make intelligent decisions than if you give them something to rebel against by trying to scare them off. There will always be people who are physiologically susceptible to substance abuse and people who engage it for the reasons Jane describes. There is also a strong cultural component to it, though, which I call the forbidden fruit syndrome. By restricting (rather, attempting to) the use of alcohol and other drugs to adults we have glamorized them and given them an appeal to young people that they do not intrinsically have. My 13 year old son gags at the taste of beer or wine, as did I at his age. In my first year of highschool I went to keggers and gagged down cups of beer not because I enjoyed the stuff but because of the desire to be cool. If there had been no legal prohibition, if it had been perfectly legal for minors to buy and consume beer, then a lot of that appeal would not have existed. There would have been nothing to prove by drinking, and the only question would have been whether the actual effects of drinking on me were desirable or not. I'm not just hypothesizing here; I spent my junior year of highschool as an exchange student in Italy, where minors are allowed to drink. Highschoolers might order a beer in a pizzeria when we went out; some did, some didn't. I never saw any social occasion organized for the sole purpose of getting together to drink to excess, as is commonly the case in the U.S. I don't claim this is the only reason young people drink, but do claim that prohibition both encourages young people to drink who otherwise would not be interested, and encourages young people to drink to excess who otherwise would only drink in moderation.

Jane,

I think the assumption made by DARE is one of irresponsibility. DARE assumes (by it's very nature) that people simply can not moderate themselves when it comes to drugs and alcohol. And they are not alone in that assumption. So (as a rule of thumb) they go off and tell kids that mommy having a beer at dinnertime makes her a drunken lush. Their assumption being, that mommy will be having ten beers.

I said they are not alone in their assumptions. The medical community operates from the same standpoint. My brother-in-law is a medical doctor. I asked him point blank, if a single glass of wine per day (at dinnertime or whenever) is healthful? He got real quiet and stated that as a doctor, he can not encourage people to drink alcohol at anytime. The thought behind that being that people do not EVER need to be encouraged to drink alcohol. But from a straight, clinical standpoint, he agreed that a glass of wine at dinnertime is healthful as it helps to thin the blood.

In our country, you will never find the popular opinion to support that type of honesty. It just isn't there, because society (as a whole) assumes people act irresponsibly.

I'll throw in a small vote in favor of DARE and MADD. I graduated from public high school in 2000, so I had a heavy dose of both programs. For me, there was no more effective deterrant to substance abuse than seeing pictures and videos of people who made themselves very, very sick by drinking or smoking. Photos and stories of kids who were killed by drunk drivers were pretty powerful, too.

I don't smoke, drink or use drugs -- I've never even tried -- and I'm certainly not alone among my friends. Youth drug use is down (http://www.samhsa.gov/news/newsreleases/060907_nsduh.aspx), and I don't doubt that DARE and MADD programs have helped that decline.

I don't think DARE simply assume irresponsibility; I think it creates it. By telling people "if you smoke a joint, you'll end up a crack whore on the streets of Baltimore", they are encouraging some of those kids to make it happen. For many kids in DARE, their self esteem is now tied to the teetotaling. If that facade cracks, there's nothing inherent inside to stop them from sliding into irresponsibility. There's no notion that "I made a mistake and can now choose not to make more." Instead, there's "if you make this mistake, you will be unable to control yourself in any other way." well, then, might as well do coke and have unprotected sex anyway, since you are worthless,lack any moral judgment, and have no additional critical thinking skills.

If you can't trust the organization which is giving you information on a certain topic then how can you trust them on other aspects of the topic which they may have right.

I was very fortunate to have parents who gave me realistic expectations of drugs. Alcohol and pot were in one category, coke in another, LSD and Herion in another. I was told never to drive under the influance of any substance (which, given that I grew up in NYC wasn't even an issue until college, by which time I had enough sensible brain cells to have me just be the designated driver everywhere). Because of this, while I did try most of the substances previously listed (Herion is the exception) I never did it to rebel, I always tried the first time in a controlled environment and, because there was no rebellion involved, generally didn't like it. There was one exception to all of this. My parents were very clear, whatever I did, I shouldn't start smoking.

So I rarely drink, I don't smoke pot, I don't do other drugs. I don't even like to take cold medicine when I'm sick, but I do love me my Camel Lights and I'm sorry they didn't just say "do whatever you want with the smokeing" because I bet I wouldn't have.

I recently had this conversation with a guy. He was saying that the schools had told him, "Start smoking pot and it leads straight to heroin."

He was laughing at this, even as schoolboys he and his friends knew that THC was not an opiate, they were totally different chemicals, there was no relationship between them. So they rejected the message and started using pot.

And did he become a heroin addict who extorted money from women for drugs? Yes.

There's a lesson in there. Maybe.

So DARE's message is not honest. But what would be a good honest message to send?

Well, I don't know that their (and other pro-abstinence folks') message is not honest, so much as it's simply wrong, or inaccurate. Too much emphasis is put on avoiding intoxicants. The emphasis rather should be on avoiding intoxication.

In other words, their message should be that getting drunk/stoned/high/intoxicated is very very bad, dangerous, etc., and that sobriety is very very good, positive, integral to financial and social success, etc.

But by banging the drum incessantly on a "stay away from this or that substance at all costs" message, they emphasize the wrong strategy.

I strongly suspect the number of successful, non-addicted people who have tried cannabis, or who enjoy a beer or a glass of wine now and then, vastly outnumbers the number of successful, non-addicted people who who have never tried intoxicants. It seems like becoming a member of the former group is a more realistic option than becoming a member of the latter, and is likely to be the basis of a more successful public health strategy.

I honestly think that many young people really never hear a sensible message about why it's dangerous or foolhardy to get drunk or high. They do hear messages about abstaining from drugs and alchol, but they're likewise aware than most adults don't follow this advice. So, when they, too, decide not to eschew trying these substances, they possess little in the way of awareness of the critical importance of moderation.

Wasn't DARE founded by former Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates -- the same guy who made the famous foot-in-mouth comment about African-Americans having a different physiology than 'normal people' [sic] ???

That ought to give y'all a clue right off as to how responsible an organization it is.

The bottom line is that being a Drug Warrior is a lucrative racket, and they don't give a rat's patootie about whether their message causes harm in the long run.

Why is it Camel Lights for thinking people? But almost everyone I've smoked out on a porch with talking about economics, politics, literature, etc, they almost all smoke Camel Lights or Djarum in some form. In fact, we once had a discussion about how the hell we all ended up smoking the same brand out of a hundred something people at a party.

But either way, I love me my Camel Lights.

I cannot understand why so many school districts embrace DARE and indeed consider it beyond criticism. DARE does not have all the answers, but its proponents act as if it does.

We talked about how one glass of wine a day has actually been shown to be good for your heart.

Yes, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with alcohol. You can get extracts from the grape seed and skin which do the same thing without putting a drop of alcohol in your body.

There are other studies which attempt to show that small amounts of alcohol are healthy. Mortality increases steadily with the amount of alcohol drunk on a regular basis, however there's a slight uptick in mortality when you go from "one cup every day or two" to "tetotaler."

This has been used to try and justify the 'a little alcohol is healthy' stance, but there was no effort to control for why people were abstaining. Many people abstain because they're sick or have problems, for instance.

I'm saying this because there seems to be a stream of carefully quoted scientific studies to justify the 'a little alcohol is healthy' stance. None of them are really that solid. I'm not telling anyone what to do, nor do I really care. I just think people are too quick to latch onto what is very likely a bogus justification for drinking alcohol and claiming it's not like other drugs.

"DARE's job is to prevent drug addiction"

False. DARE's job is to turn minor children into (unpaid, undocumented, and unprotected) police informants against their relatives and friends. Forgetting along the way that a few drugs are (much to their dismay) not actually illegal, is just a side effect.

"DARE's job is to prevent drug addiction" Are there any studies that show it is effective at reducing drug addiction?

I think Matt has identified the most prominent temporary effect. But it is temporary for most kids. Most will sooner or later find out that part of DARE's message was bullsh*t. How many of them then go on to think it was all bullsh*t, and wind up addicted?

I grew up before DARE, but the schools had their collection of anti-drug movies. They were so ridiculous they should have been presented as comedies. They did teach us one valuable lesson - distrust authority figures. (Presidents Johnson and Nixon did a lot to reinforce that lesson...)

I'm in an odd situation on these issues, as a lifelong nondrinker whose brother died of alcoholism last year. I suppose I've had a good close look at both extremes.

And I have two young children myself, so I'm facing the issue of what advice to give them. I don't expect them to be like me. I've never had a drop of liquor, never smoked, never taken any feeling-altering drug stronger than, say, ibuprofen. I don't even drink coffee. That's highly unlikely behavior - whether it's good or bad (or to what degree) is another issue, but there's no doubt that it's unlikely, and it does have some social costs.

My wife has a glass of wine every so often, so the kids aren't being raised in some sort of temperance boot camp. I agree that teaching people moderation is the best general course.

But having watched what my brother went through, I know that for some people - a reasonably small, but completely unpredictable subset of the general population - one drug or another can turn out to be disastrous. I want my kids to understand that, and to know that there's at least some immediate family history of it. I need to balance that with making sure that they understand that if they ever do get into trouble with some substance, that I'm not going to kill or disown them, but rather will do everything possible to help them out of it.

But we did everything we could think of to help my brother out of it, too, and nothing ever worked. Moderation wasn't in the cards for him, probably (looking back on it) not even from the very beginning.

I wonder how many people who drink heavily have chronic pain. I find temporary relief when drinking, but it's also followed by an temporary uptick in the level of pain.

Drugs can be dangerous and amoung those who use them in high school a small percentage will have their lives ruined by them. It is probably impossible to distinguish beforehand between those who can experiment and quit easily and those who will be addicted. Given that amoung those who abstain totally none will have their lives wrecked by drugs, it seems to me to be the responsible thing to do is to encourage young people to abstain. Whether DARE is effective at this or even if an effective program is possible is another question.

" ... Drugs can be dangerous and amoung those who use them in high school a small percentage will have their lives ruined by them...."

An interesting question, though, is whether that same cohort would simply find some other way to ruin their lives if drugs did not exist?

In other words: Is the excessive drug use a cause of the self-destruction, or just a symptom of self-destructive impulses that were already there?

The problem with programs like Alcoholics Anonymous is that they ARE anonymous. No scientific data can be used to determine there effectiveness and no data exists to support them. They tend to use the model that everyone will behave as those with a hereditary predisposition to alcoholism would, and that "one drink equals one drunk." There are, of course, other types of drinkers and drug users.

I think a big part of the problem of alcohol comes from the fact that

drinking allows them to free their id from its neurotic chains for a while without social consequences. Well, I mean, there are social consequences, of course, but you can get away with setting cars on fire or sleeping with half the track team with surprisingly little social opprobrium.

Binge drinking exists everywhere. Sometimes it is an exploration of one's own limits, and when that is the case, you grow out of it fairly quickly. But when you find out you can avoid any responsibility for your actions, you actually have an incentive to binge drink.

Sourcreamus: I suggest that perhaps neuroscience will be able to figure out (pre-alcoholism) who cannot moderate their drinking.

How, though, is anyone's guess. Perhaps alcoholism screenings at 12 just like scoliosis tests?

you can get away with setting cars on fire or sleeping with half the track team with surprisingly little social opprobrium.

I don't know about others but I'm interested in hearing more about those college days.

I thought there were a bunch of studies in the 90s showing DARE to have no effect on drug use. Five minutes with Google re-enforces this, though I haven't read those studies, so maybe they're all wrong.

This ought not to be a huge shock, right? Virtually all parents do their best to keep their kids from drinking and using drugs, and parents care more and have more knowledge of their kids and power over them than the DARE program or the schools. Yet a reasonably high fraction of kids use drugs and drink, and some fraction of them step on the genetic/personality/whatever landmine and end up as lifelong drunks or drug addicts.

In France, without drinking you can get away with setting cars on fire with surprisingly little social opprobrium.

Perhaps if we destigmatize the setting of cars on fire....

The main problem I see with DARE is that ends up being a support for the de facto Full Employment Act for Mexican and Other Drug Lords and Anybody Who Wants To Hire On.

DARE? I doubt it actually encourages demand that much. I assume you mean the whole War on Drugs.

albatross, I'm not sure it encourages demand either. What it does do is coach everybody socially to say or think 'Drugs bad, sky fall.' To talk about anything other than blanket prohibition is to have to sell the argument, 'Sky only fall litle bit. Repairs to keep sky present height very expensive. Better alternative affect use other way.'

Neal: Why is it Camel Lights for thinking people?

Damn, I smoke Benson & Hedges. Does this mean I'm dumb?

Let's be honest: for many of us, our happiest college memories ended up face down in a toilet.

Sorry, but I get a little tired of people treating binge-drinking as if it was some cute rite of passage. I didn't binge drink in college, nor did any of my friends -- except for the one who downed about a dozen beers then tried to drive home. You can guess the results.

Drinking and/or drugging yourself into oblivious isn't cute, or funny, or something "everybody does". It's evil, pure and simple.

Jane wrote: Yet most of the people I know who did cocaine stopped on their own, some through never developing a habit, and others through getting tired of it.

I'm kind of surprised you didn't/don't know of anyone who stopped cocaine by dying. Or maybe that's included in the "getting tired of it"? A friend of mine from San Francisco some years back, who had lost some friends, suggested to me that it isn't the last gram that is expensive, but the first...

DARE's message is clearly producing a mixed result, at best. But it's an attempt to keep children and teenagers a bit further away from stuff that can kill them, for a little longer. I used to deride it totally, until I spent some time with some modern high school students, who happened to read at the 6th grade level and think...a bit lower down than that. For some, the only reason they kept a "C" average was because Coach told 'em they would not be able to play on the team otherwise. Others just did not care. Maybe after a time as a stock clerk at a big box store, or shoveling slop at a drive-through, they'll go to the community college. Or maybe they'll do something stupid and get in prison, or dead. Keeping them from doing something stupid for a while, until a little more cerebral cortex wiring is complete, is a laudable effort. Since seeing some of the people the public schools have to edumicate, now I'm not so sure DARE is the absolute worst way to approach the issue, although it clearly isn't the best.

But "go try a bunch of addictive substances" is quite frankly insane, and anyone who has ever been around an opiate addict in need of a fix will tell you so. It ain't pretty, and it's a much deeper-in-the-bone need than your ciggies, Megan. It's rather reprehensible and a bit despicable to suggest, on a par with "Go try driving various motor vehicles while drunk, and then walk away from the ones you can't control". Reconsider it, please.

PS: If it was a joke, you need to quit buying jokes from Jon Carry's speechwriters.

The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine

Actually, I quite prefer a kiss with a man who's had a scotch. Mmmmm.

I think telling kids 'don't do this' is not the most effective message, although I do think a mixture of scary stories, and truthful education can work- freak them out a bit with the drug addict who totally effed up their life, in order to give them a bit of pause, and hopefully make them consider the risks. But also give them accurate statistics and show them the range of experiences people can have with drugs or whatever. That way you won't be totally discredited when the kids see their own friends doing drugs or whatever and not going round the bend.

Although, I think the best method may just be to help kids figure it out themselves. My dad is an eye doctor, who does a fair bit of research, and when i was a kid he used to show me the abstracts and statistical summaries of his research, and the one thing I remember was that one of the risk factors that cropped up every single time was smoking.

I knew that smoking caused lung cancer and all that, which made me think it might not be the smartest drug to get hooked on, but it was seeing that smoking also increased your chance of getting glaucoma and macular degeneration and all these bizarre eye diseases that really showed me the scope of the damage it could do to your health. And for me, that (and the fact I didn't like the smell of them) was enough to convince me not to even try one, and I remember deciding this at quite a young age, and it actually sticking.

In the end, I've tried my fair share of legal and illegal substances, but cigarettes are not one of them.

Alright, so dare probably isn't he most efficient way to ward children away from becoming crack whores and drug lords. But, perhaps in a few cases we can see some posotive impact from the program. Admitidly the posotive feedback is most likely negligable compared to the moderate or negative feedback. But my personal experiance with dare with pretty possotive. In the 5th grade we all awaited D.A.R.E. day happily not only did we get out of silent reading time, but we usually got to sit with our friends and socalize at a rather formal assembly. after words we all got cupcakes and milk.... now.... maybe it's just my 5th grade mind talking but if cupcakes and milk are a reward for staying away from drugs and alcohal.... well I'll never touch either. Later I realized how wonderfull intoxication was after beeing peer pressured into it... but none-the-less Mmmmm.. cupcakes.

And by alcohal I definitely meant alcohol.

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