<story><title>How to get 7th graders to smoke</title><url>https://www.experimental-history.com/p/how-to-get-7th-graders-to-smoke</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patwolf</author><text>This brought back memories of the D.A.R.E. officer coming to my elementary classroom to give us the &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t do drugs&amp;quot; speech. At the end of the speech with feigning hesitation he&amp;#x27;d pull out the drug briefcase to the cheers of the kids, like a band holding out their best song for the encore.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This here is methamphetamine, aka crystal meth or speed. If you see a man running down the street with the strength of a bear, there&amp;#x27;s a good chance he&amp;#x27;s high on this. It&amp;#x27;s very bad. You don&amp;#x27;t want to get near this--it&amp;#x27;ll make your heart explode.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a wonder that didn&amp;#x27;t work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flatline</author><text>I did not get the briefcase in my DARE education. What I did get is a cop telling me that my parents having a glass of wine with dinner or a cigarette after work was just as bad a them using cocaine, and that you could OD and die on weed. All drugs are equally bad.&lt;p&gt;A few years later when my friends were smoking weed and laughed at my concerns, and I realized I’d been lied to, I pretty much did everything under the sun.&lt;p&gt;An actual education would have let me make better choices about my recreational drug use as a young person.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to get 7th graders to smoke</title><url>https://www.experimental-history.com/p/how-to-get-7th-graders-to-smoke</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patwolf</author><text>This brought back memories of the D.A.R.E. officer coming to my elementary classroom to give us the &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t do drugs&amp;quot; speech. At the end of the speech with feigning hesitation he&amp;#x27;d pull out the drug briefcase to the cheers of the kids, like a band holding out their best song for the encore.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This here is methamphetamine, aka crystal meth or speed. If you see a man running down the street with the strength of a bear, there&amp;#x27;s a good chance he&amp;#x27;s high on this. It&amp;#x27;s very bad. You don&amp;#x27;t want to get near this--it&amp;#x27;ll make your heart explode.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a wonder that didn&amp;#x27;t work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>delichon</author><text>In high school around 1976 we got a talk by the swim team coach, telling us the horrors of various drugs, going into his wide personal experience with them and why we shouldn&amp;#x27;t follow his example. He told us that if we ever had any questions he was there for us, and gave us all his personal phone number.&lt;p&gt;So me and some buddies got a hold of some peyote and were more than a little afraid of it. We probably would have tossed it but we had a better idea. We called Coach and asked his advice. He gave us detailed preparation instructions. We followed them and got a bit sick, but not altered. Maybe it wasn&amp;#x27;t even peyote.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure that this approach was just more nuanced than &amp;quot;just say no&amp;quot; or closer to &amp;quot;just do it&amp;quot;.</text></comment>