On a serious note i totally agree with you SHM. Drug education with kids should show the positives as well as the negatives and provide as much info as possible. Just say no certainly has no credibility.
It should be just say KNOW
Hear, hear.
Students
always rebel against their teachers. It's hard-coded into us; it's an evolutionarily-useful way of clearing out useless superstitions (superstitious behaviour can confer a positive survival advantage,
if by chance the behaviour happens to be advantageous; but the majority of superstitious behaviour will be neutral. Behaviour which is
disadvantageous will tend not to be repeated; rather, the
advantageous behaviour consisting of
not doing it will tend to be reinforced among {surviving members of} the group.
No way! Last person who touched one of those while the moon was full is dead
already -- I'm not going near
it!) It's a sort of experiment to determine
which learned behaviours are actually useful enough to be worth passing on. (
I'm not even sure the moon has anything to do with it. It was new moon, and I still got really
sick, like I'm lucky to be alive .....)
But even without knowing the correct explanation for why a particular behaviour is beneficial, it should be obvious to anyone who just takes the time to observe people, how people behave. And there is no excuse for expecting it to be any other way; it's like expecting to find a triangle whose angles did not add up to 180 degrees, even although every single one of the ones you have measured so far have added up to 180 degrees. You tell a kid not to do something, they're going to do it, even if only to find out what's so bad about it. It always has been that way, it still is that way, and it isn't showing any sign of changing anytime soon.
And once you accept that telling kids not to do something is not going to work
and that is not your fault, you can say well, if we can't stop kids from taking drugs altogether and therefore suffering no drug harm at all, then surely the next best thing to do is try to ensure that as little harm as possible is done when they inevitably do take drugs. But so far, it's turned into a Chicken game, and nobody wants to be the first to admit that it isn't working.
My spell with needles was incredibly brief, had not a clue what I was doing besides what I'd read online. The only person who could show me in person didn't want the 'responsibility' of having potentially ruined my life (despite being my connect for years).
I once found out, not long after the event, that I had just shown someone how to chase the beetle for the first time.
I try not to dwell on the possibility that the other members of the group might purposely have left me to do the dark deed, knowing that I most probably would never see this person again. It certainly wasn't anything to do with my technique.
