Marijuana is its own special category, but club drugs (which for some reason include date rape drugs), inhalants and steroids are all in a “miscellaneous” category together?
Also, note all the ridiculous drug propaganda lies.
Marijuana is its own special category, but club drugs (which for some reason include date rape drugs), inhalants and steroids are all in a “miscellaneous” category together?
Also, note all the ridiculous drug propaganda lies.
What specifically stands out to you as a ridiculous bit of probaganda?
It’s certainly not the most accurate or clinical, and some of the categories are a bit “eh”, but nothing popped out to me that I would describe so strongly.
If nothing else, it’s a lot more objective and grounded in reality than what they gave me in that dumb dare program. Might be why my reaction is just “close enough”.
Marijuana being a gateway drug.
Also being the most abused drug. I’d say that would be caffeine. There are more people who take caffeine daily than cannabis. But this seems to be about “bad” drugs, not “good” drugs.
I’d give it to alcohol, not caffeine personally. I wouldn’t say most people “abuse” caffeine, they just drink it.
Abuse to me implies having a negative impact, and I can think of more people who have been negatively impacted by weed than by caffeine, but way more from alcohol than either, and with a significantly more negative impact.
I know people who smoke too much and it’s definitely made them stagnate in life and gain a lot of weight.
I know people who drink way too much caffeine and get insomnia, leading to a cycle of discomfort and heartburn from all the coffee.
I know people who drank too much alcohol and died, or developed terrible health complications.
Most people are totally fine with all of them, but alcohol is easily the worst and most common.
Yup, that’s a good one. Gateway drug notion is generally iffy at the absolute most generous.
This one wasn’t as “smoking the weed will make you do heroin and die” as others, just “some people do other things after doing this one”, but it’s still not super worth mentioning.
What are you supposed to do? Start with meth?
Yeah, that’s the thought. That or ecstacy or something.
In reality, it’s mostly that it’s so common that everyone who might do “hard drugs” would have been exposed to pot as just background noise, like alcohol or chocolate ice cream.
It only gets a shade of credence because there have been studies indicating that some people start with pill based drugs and then just leave it at that with a “hard drug” incidence rate lower than someone who smoked pot.
The sample sizes are so small that the only real conclusion someone can draw is that it’s not definitely false and it needs more study. But it’s not that important, so funding is slow and unlikely.
Yeah my bullshit detector is going off for the pills thing as well. The fact that they’re pills (small, compact, no smoking/smell) would skew it heavily.
It is funny to picture the hypothetical person they need to find to interview for the data though.
This is Larry.
Larry once took a Valium he wasn’t prescribed at a friend’s house, but Larry respects his body too much to smoke weed.
Larry is addicted to intravenous heroin.
Larry takes the L
That was the only thing that popped out to me.
I mean that’s been a “thing” since at least the late 80s. Not that i think its accurate but its all too common an opinion you will find that isnt completely batshit crazy.
DARE came to my HS in the mid-late 80s. A cop was standing at a table with various things on it. One of which was a big bag of weed. I said,“Damn! That’s a big bag of weed!” The cop replied, totally seriously,“THAT’S ENOUGH WEED TO KILL YOU!!!” My friends and I just laughed and walked away.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing. It’s close enough for the target audience. Doesn’t go the any extreme.
I agree too. Just the classifications alone seem close enough, and GHB is absolutely a ‘club’ drug that also happens to be a date rape drug. Back in my heyday, I knew several people that would use it recreationally when we’d go out to an EDM show (or in the hours after we got back to the crash pad to keep the party going).
I didn’t read the whole thing, so I can comment on specific content like ‘weed being a gateway’ drug, but that’s been disproven time and time again and this type of propaganda is common from schools and the government as they’re bound by archaic laws to portray drugs in such a way.
The information in the hallucinogenic section about acid flashbacks is incorrect. This was a false rumour spread in the 70s to demonize the political opponents of Nixon.
Hrm, I always thought it was just a mis-name for PTSD after an excessive dose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder
It looks like there’s at least a degree of clinical validation to it being a combo of PTSD and “sometimes colors stay funny for a while”.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of “the entire war on drugs, but particularly pot and heroin”?
That’s what I thought was an invention by the Nixon administration.
I agree, but I don’t think D.A.R.E. was dumb. It was just difficult to hear the personal opinions that officers had of people who had been on particular drugs that are so often used in a hospital setting. Between the time I was an infant to the time I was ten, I had already been hospitalized for various illnesses and injuries that sometimes required hospital grade medications. Try telling a third grade kid that she is a bad person because the hospital put her on intravenous pain medication after having both her radius and ulna completely broken in a fall from the school’s playground equipment.
On a side note, after so many hospitalizations in my life, I absolutely hate people who use drugs for fun.
Wait, so you think dare wasn’t dumb, but you have specific negative memories associated with it mischarecterizing drug users due to your legitimate usage?
I would call a program that makes children feel bad for going to the doctor “dumb”.
Your dislike of people who use drugs because you went to the hospital a lot is quite strange. I’m not sure why those would be related.
Did they put you in the hospital, or make a police officer come to your school and tell you you were a bad person?
D.A.R.E. never hurt me. Sorry it seems like the program did something abusive to you personally. You could always file a police report about it, if it was that bad. It’s not like the officers who led it were abusive drug users in our lives, sent to the classroom to beat us with belts, or closed fists. If your biggest gripe from childhood is a bunch of drug abuse resistance education officers, lecturing you for less than one hour, then you had a pretty privileged childhood.
You’re making a lot of leaps there from me calling it “dumb”.
You’ll have to forgive me for thinking it made you uncomfortable, considering that’s what you said.
And none of that even touches where you get the connection between “I was in the hospital” and “I hate drug users”.
D.A.R.E. pretty much defined all of the drugs and their side effects, so children could be educated about drugs. Nothing they said about types of drugs, their uses, or their side effects was medically incorrect. I don’t know why you’re calling it dumb.
I’m sorry, did you say YOU make me uncomfortable? Because putting words in my mouth does that. I didn’t say anything about being uncomfortable before that.
Hey look, if you want to say D.A.R.E. was dumb, and you would rather have a lifestyle that includes recreational drug use, who am I to stop you? I just think you would feel differently if you were in the hospital, for some surgery, or emergency, and had to have some of those drugs given to you intravenously. I doubt you’d go looking for more of them after an experience like that. You’d be looking for a garbage can to puke the next morning, and crying about having a splitting headache from hell. You’d be crying because you want to eat food, but can’t trust your stomach to handle it. Go have your “fun”, and denounce programs like D.A.R.E. Maybe you’ll feel differently if you find yourself in a hospital recovery room one day.
Forgive me for thinking these phrases imply discomfort. I can only go by my life experiences, which led me to think that calling experiences “difficult”, or being called a “bad person” by an authority figure would be aptly described as at least “uncomfortable”.
Dare was dumb because it was an abject failure. Presenting information in the most alarmist possible context while being dry to the point that kids tune out any significant information is a terrible way to treat health education.
You have some very confusing issues tying your hospital experience to a personal judgement of people who use drugs.
Do you think that other people haven’t been to the hospital? Do you think that I haven’t been to the hospital? It’s not that uncommon. Hell, you mentioned breaking your arm falling off some playground equipment. I had the same injury as a child, except I also had a greenstick fracture in my humorous that I had to be put under to have corrected. I was so ill coming out of anesthesia that I remember it less fondly than the actual injury.
Jumping from a bad experience with intravenous pain killers to “I hate people” is weird. Those people didn’t have anything to do with it. Why do you hate them? Not understand? Sure, that would make sense. Find foolish? Totally get it. But hate? Why hate?
And why all drug users? What does a pothead have to do with it at all?
Given your experience and the way they made you feel from the practitioners’ sheer ignorant and biased approach I would have thought you’d definitely be the first to call the program “dumb” as the very least of the criticisms to be levelled at it.
I don’t think it was dumb to educate children about the dangers of drug abuse. What I think is dumb, is the new program they have created to replace D.A.R.E. That program has representatives that stand outside of stores, pestering shoppers for donations, and when the shoppers decline, the representatives say things like, “guess you choose drugs!” while fake coughing to mask their remarks. That’s immature and unprofessional. D.A.R.E. was more professional.
I think my surprise here is that given the program’s reputation, and your experience with it, it seems there was quite some gulf between theoretical intent and practice. Educating children about drugs, probably seems relatively uncontroversial to most, I think you could get a lot of people with otherwise pretty different views on drugs to get behind the idea. The way the D.A.R.E. program went about it and the content of the program and the accuracy of the education they attempted to deliver seem from a distance to have been very questionable. This is why it’s so perplexing to me why you hold such a surprising level of respect for D.A.R.E., I mean sure the intent could have been education, but it doesn’t sound very much like the intent and the reality had a lot of overlap. I’m careful with my wording here because where I grew up we didn’t have ‘D.A.R.E.’ specifically so I can only form judgment based on what one hears and reads about the program.
Well, I had D.A.R.E., and unless someone put something in my food, or stuck me with something, I haven’t used illegal recreational drugs. I say illegal recreational drugs, because I can’t be held responsible for what the hospitals have given me in surgeries, and during labor/delivery. I don’t blame D.A.R.E. for the things that have happened to me in my life.