Getting with the Times: Drug Education in America

In our world filled with potentially harmful over-the-counter and prescription drugs, our drug education programs focus almost solely on illicit drugs.

We live in an extraordinary time in which we have a medi­cal cure for virtually all ailments. If we have a cough, we take Robitussin. Soreness and headaches demand aspirin. When we are tired or just need a little boost, we drink some caffeine, whether it is in soda, tea, or coffee. When we are faced with more serious ail­ments, we go to the doctor and receive prescription drugs like an­tibiotics, sleep aids, and powerful painkillers. Let’s face it, drugs are everywhere in our society, and their effects are highly evident in our day-to-day life. The ubiquitous nature of drugs necessitates effective drug education. Unfortunately, our drug education pro­grams, by ignoring the inherent complexities of the subject matter, have become ineffective.

In our world filled with potentially harmful over-the-counter and prescription drugs, our drug education programs focus almost solely on illicit drugs. While many illicit drugs are incred­ibly harmful, many legal drugs can be just as danger­ous, if not more dangerous. We have created a world in which hundreds of millions of people cannot live without caffeine for a day, thousands of people abuse painkillers, both over-the-counter and prescription, and millions of people are prescribed highly addictive sleep aids, with few people recogniz­ing that this is not the society for which we have strived. The frightening reality is that the real dangers lie in our own backyard, or more specifically, our own medicine cabinets. Over many years, through frequently changing drug education programs, illicit drug use among teens has steadily declined; over-the-counter and prescription drug abuse, however, has skyrock­eted among teens. This should be no surprise, as the one constant among our drug education programs has been the portrayal of legal drugs as both safe and useful. This dogmatic portrayal of legal drugs as unequivocal miracles has been further exacerbated by the highly accessible nature of these drugs to our youth. Legal drugs are everywhere and are used by everyone. While they greatly en­hance life as we know it, they also have an incredible potential for misuse. For example, painkillers, many of which are incred­ibly similar both in their chemistry and physiological effects to heroin and other opiates, are increasingly used recreationally as the number of people addicted to them grows exponentially each year. Likewise, cold medicines have become incredibly prevalent as drugs of abuse among youth, due to their high accessibility and “harmless” nature. As the rate of abuse of legal drugs continues to escalate rapidly, we must stop ignoring the potential for misuse of these drugs in our drug education programs.

The phenomenon of rapidly increasing legal drug abuse has one primary culprit: our drug education’s focus on “abstinence-only” education as opposed to “responsible use” education. Ab­stinence-only education is highly ineffective for one fundamental reason: it ignores the complexities that our children face. We are telling our children that some drugs are never acceptable, whereas other drugs are always acceptable. These “always acceptable” drugs have become common drugs of abuse because, as is typified by cold medicines, they are exceedingly accessible and viewed as unquestionably harmless. This message being sent to children poses a significant threat to both our children’s wellbe­ing and our trust with our children, as we are deceiv­ing them. The message we should be sending children is that drugs are acceptable if, and only if, they are used responsibly. Whether it’s Tylenol or heroin, abuse is abuse.

A more fundamen­tal problem in our ap­proach to drug education that we must recognize is that we are telling our children what to do, rather than teaching them how to make good decisions. We want to ensure that our children are able to make decisions about all things in a responsible manner, not hope that we have already taught them what to do in every situation that they encounter. Our goal should be to educate our youth about the hazards of drugs and the proper use of drugs, rather than giving them a list of drugs that are always acceptable to use and a list of those that are never permissible to use. Rampant oversimplification of drugs is one of the key underlying flaws of our drug education curriculum.

We must vastly change our drug education curriculum to in­clude legal drugs as well as responsible-use education. We must focus on teaching our children to make responsible and safe deci­sions based upon the pertinent and life-saving information that we teach them in drug education programs. Now is the time for us to fight for a better tomorrow for youth through a more effective and comprehensive drug education program.