My thoughts on the D.A.R.E. anti-drug curriculum that I grew up with & what I would say to middle school and high school students who are experimenting with drugs.
I grew up in the '90s and aughts, when Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign had evolved into a program called Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.), which involved local police officers coming to schools to educate students on the appearance, properties, and risks of different types of drugs.
There were other aspects of the curriculum, too. I remember a presentation by a former professional football player named Dan Davis, who had struggled with cocaine addiction, and a mom from Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), who had lost her son to a drunk driving accident.
In a basic sort of way, this programming made sense: Tell kids what was out there and educate them about the dangers involved, and they would make the logical decision to avoid trying potentially harmful substances.
Unfortunately, even mentally healthy teenagers aren't always rational actors.
Moreover, doing drugs can be a rational solution to certain problems. The downsides and true costs are often sporadic or delayed by years, meaning that, if your problem is pressing enough, substances can deliver significant relief for a long while before it ever catches up with you (with interest, of course).
More significantly, though, the conversation around drugs, although it sometimes acknowledged peer pressure, was never connected in any way with broader mental health topics such as anxiety, depression, pressure, failure, loneliness, community, spirituality, shame.
I can't remember a single time when drug use was linked to mental health struggles; we didn't have so much as a five-minute mini-workshop on checking in with friends about mental health; breathing exercises; suicide prevention; mental health medication and therapy resources.
The anti-drug model of the era seemed to be founded on the belief that early experimentation based on curiosity, impulsivity, or peer pressure leads to addiction further down the line.
Even Dan Davis, the football player who shared his story with us, reinforced this narrative. He spoke about getting into partying as a professional athlete "cool guy," then having it pick up steam and eventually escape his control. I don't remember him mentioning his childhood, self-image, trauma, or other mental health issues at all.
Having spent two decades in the company of addicts struggling to recover, I can tell you that most of us have significant mental health struggles that drugs and alcohol typically present as a useful solution to (at first).*
*Addiction is a primary diagnosis, meaning that otherwise mentally healthy people do sometimes become addicts. However, such people tend to get into treatment, enter recovery, and maintain sobriety with relative ease. Most addicts start early on in life, struggle significantly with trauma and other mental health problems, and have a very rough, nonlinear experience with achieving long-term recovery.
The issue is that you can't take away a coping mechanism (drug use) without offering healthy alternatives, and you can't do that until you understand what exactly young people are running from when they are flocking toward drugs.
The other issue with the D.A.R.E. programming was that it completely failed to take into account the burgeoning opioid epidemic, which carried unique risks and dangers that should've been highlighted in a meaningful way.
I remember when the first person in my community, the older brother of a classmate of mine, died of a heroin OD in his apartment in town; his pregnant girlfriend was sleeping next to him, as every one of the 5,000 residents of our town discovered the next morning.
It was unthinkable. Even my mom - a criminal defense attorney whose clients gave her better-than-average insight into the drugs landscape of my home city - figured that he had gotten mixed up in some "city stuff."
The idea that the most addictive drugs on the menu were present in profusion in our parents' medicine cabinets, and that because of them, powdered, snortable heroin was becoming mainstream, was so foreign that it went completely unaddressed.
Put briefly, you might not have been able to convince me (and my peers) not to try drugs, period, but you might have stood a chance of convincing some of us not to try certain drugs, and opioids should have been brought to the top of that no-fly list.
The astronomical rate of drug use at my high school spoke to the failure of the anti-drug programming of the time. I've had several friends who I grew up with die of overdose, and dozens more have struggled with addiction.
It wasn't just my high school, either. My generation, the Millennials, went on to set records for rates of substance use, addiction, and death by overdose.
***
I had a fellow teacher ask me an interesting question the other day: "What would you say to your younger self about doing drugs? What would you tell him?"
I had to really stop and consider that one.
My initial response was that I would lay out the abysmal, graphic lows of addiction for him - both the physical and the emotional ones. What it felt like to do some of the things that I ended up doing to get money for drugs; what cold-turkey benzo and opioid detox is like; how despairingly awful it was when the relief that I was seeking eventually became physiologically unattainable even when I did have money.
After thinking about it for a while, though, I realized that I wouldn't tell my younger self anything. Personal stories about experiences with addiction can be powerful and life-changing, but typically only when they contain elements that allow listeners to relate to the sharer's story and only when the audience is properly prepared by their own experience to really hear and internalize what is discussed.
Instead of approaching this hypothetical conversation with my younger self from the prescriptive perspective of telling him something, I think that I would ask him a couple of questions instead - which, if reflected upon honestly, would hopefully cause him to awaken to some of the red flags around his substance use.
(1) What are you hoping to achieve in using substances?
Some of my earliest substance use was motivated by simple curiosity.
I've written elsewhere about my esoteric interests; I was also into yoga, Gnostic (transcendental / non-apocryphal) Christianity, occult topics. I was fascinated by the prospect of achieving altered states through physical, psychological, and spiritual methods. Distance running and reading, too, provided means for escaping my ordinary consciousness.
My earliest experimentation with weed, mushrooms, and acid was mostly pretty innocuous; it was aimed at opening "the doors of perception" and seeing my world in a different way. I was after adventure, insight, and camaraderie, and I found all three.
I don't particularly subscribe to the gateway theory of drug abuse, and I wouldn't necessarily want my younger self to veer away from these experiences.
However, things got much darker as I delved into alcohol, opiates / opioids, and benzos. I very quickly latched onto these depressant and anxiolytic drugs because taking them was the only time that I felt calm and comfortable in my own skin.
I only felt like the "real me," the me I wanted to be, when I was on them.
My hope is that this first question would help my younger self to realize the difference between the two sets of motivations and to consider the heightened danger in using drugs that gave me relief from a sense of self and an emotional intensity that felt difficult to bear.
It might also get him thinking about other, safer ways to achieve the same ends.
(2) When will it be enough?
Okay, so if my young self realizes that he is using alcohol, benzos, and opioids to feel safe, calm, and loved / accepted, I would then ask him how much of that relief he believes is safe or necessary.
Is one escape a month enough? One escape a week?
I knew that these drugs were physically addictive and that I was playing a dangerous game in using them, but the issue was that - like most addicts - I never set hard boundaries on my use of substances until long past the point at which I was both dependent and addicted, at which juncture stopping them was vastly more difficult and complicated.
I would hope that my younger self would realize that a shortcut to bliss was a dangerous thing, and that, again, he needed to find alternative ways to achieve the relief that he was seeking.
I'd also hope that getting him to commit to firm limits on using these substances would make him realize when he was venturing into addictive territory - giving him a chance to stop before full physical dependence set in and it became, in many ways, too late.
(3) Why aren't you "worth it"?
I shot up heroin when I was 15.
I felt very little fear about having a needle put in my arm for the first time. I had experienced the pure paradise of opioid escape when I tried oxy, and I yearned for that escape far more than I was afraid of anything.
I knew that it could (theoretically) kill me, especially given that this was before the days of widespread Narcan availability, but for reasons that are difficult to articulate and that probably have to do with genetics / brain wiring, that thought didn't trouble me much. I was terrified of dying and still sporadically tormented by the notion of spending eternity in Hell, but for some reason, taking on life-threatening risks didn't have the effect on me that it would on most people. The risk didn't connect or register in a meaningful way.
My final question to my younger self wouldn't be why he wasn't afraid of dying; it would be why his life wasn't worth more than throwing away for a few hours of bliss - no matter how intense and yearned-for.
I struggled with low self-worth as a young person, partly due to my family situation and partly due to my own discomfort with my sexual orientation. I don't even think that I realized this at the time; my negative emotions, my self-image, and my risk-taking seemed to be three separate sets of issues. Like most young people. I externalized many of my problems, linking them to my family situation, limited independence, living in a community where most people were so different from me, and so on.
The younger me simply did not realize how incredibly wrong something had to be for me to experiment in the way that I did. Because my life mostly looked "successful" insofar as a teenager's can be, I didn't really register how drastically off things had to be for me to justify this kind of risk-taking.
It was easy enough to look around at my classmates' drug use to find support for the idea that what I was doing was "normal"; the key differences in extent and frequency between what I was doing and what they were doing only became clear in retrospect.
Even if this question about self-worth jarred the younger me a bit, though, would it really change anything? You can't shock someone into loving themself enough not to put their life in danger.
My hope is that it would at least prompt him to be more honest, to seek out friends and mentors who could help him move toward "self-love" (a trite expression that I have never used before but mean wholeheartedly here).
Part of feeling inadequate as a young person meant that there was always a public me and a private me, and the obligation to keep the public persona strong and sure regardless of how the private me was doing was so intense that I rarely allowed myself to be vulnerable with anyone (I was kind of a sardonic teenager, although I occasionally startled myself and others with sudden emotional outbursts).
If you asked someone from high school what I was like, they would tell you that I was motivated and confident (in the case of the latter quality, probably to a fault).
I don't want to get into the family dynamics too much, but my parents - though wonderful people in so many ways - have their own struggles and shortcomings, which made it very difficult to approach them for honest conversations about difficult subjects, which would've felt like failure.
I think in my entire life, the only person who I've felt unconditional love from was my maternal grandmother, but she wasn't really in a position to see and support me on the day-to-day, and I loved her so much that I didn't want to trouble her with my problems, anyway.
I never had a best friend, and I didn't really have anyone who I could talk to about the really serious stuff growing up. I learned early on that excelling at things brought admiration and social support, whereas displays of weakness and negative emotion were derided (or at least, made people uncomfortable).
I am sure that 99.9 percent of the adults and even most of my peers would have been absolutely astounded to know that I had shot heroin as a sophomore in high school.
What can I say? In my own way, I arrived at very efficient ways to avoid certain problems and discomforts. The cost in the long run, however, was grim.
With my third and final question, I'd aim to wake my younger self up, to make him realize that what felt like youthful impulsivity and sensation- and adventure-seeking was really the crest of a wave with a much darker base of insecurity, self-loathing, and emotional desperation.
***
In general, I think that small-group sessions geared toward mental health in general rather than drug abuse prevention specifically would be much more useful than the sort of standardized D.A.R.E. curriculum that I grew up with.
You have to talk with kids to figure out what's going on with them; a one-size-fits-all approach is doomed.
Moreover, people don't generally like to be told no; you've got to show them the bigger "yes" that they're gaining by turning down things like drugs, which deliver powerful, immediate, consistent gratification.
It's hard for me to know if any such program could have saved me, though. My addiction felt like fate.
I've written about how extensively addiction is present on both sides of my family and how immediately and completely I latched onto anxiolytic and euphoric depressants like alcohol, benzos, and opioids.*
*After I tried alcohol for the first time when I was 12, I would come home from cross-country practice in middle school and sip half a glass of my mom's wine to chill out a bit before I did my homework. From the first time that I tried alcohol and drugs, my thinking revolved around the next time that I could obtain that relief; time became separated into sober time and enjoyable time.
It's certainly possible that different programming might have given me useful skills for limiting my substance use, connecting with my peers, and reaching out for help when I finally realized that I needed it.
I know that this wasn't my most coherent post, fam. I've been having awful methadone withdrawal nightmares; I spent last night hiding from a sinister shooter, crouched behind a pillar with another young guy who was convulsing with fear as the killer approached us.
If you've never had drug withdrawal (REM rebound) dreams, you are blessed! Even though I only slept for a couple of hours, I decided to wake up and proofread this slop rather than risk re-entering my nightmare.
I see the views on my posts, and it means so much to me to know that the core group of you are still reading what I write every single week. It's mind-blowing that anyone chooses to spend any of their time listening to me, really.
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