Drug prevention day at my school. WTF

The drug education focuses on keeping young people away from drugs. It doesn't prepare young people to situations where they're offered drugs and they decide to try (other than "don't do it").

I think the current focus is fatalist and it isn't very flattering from humanistic point of view. As if people couldn't take real information (there would be a lot to say about the real dangers of drugs and about possible not-so-nice byproducts of drug usage as well), process it and make reasonable decisions but they have to be intimidated by feeding scary mental images that distort the reality.

The society, though, has its own interests. Drug education is mostly directed to people younger than 18, it's kind of understandable the society doesn't want kids/young people to use drugs. Still, I think we should move the focus more away from the intimidating, more towards fact-based education. Education for example about what doing drugs can do to underdeveloped brain is maybe even more scary (** because it's REAL **) than the images of "junkies laying on their dirty sofa with needles in their forearm" (because that's not gonna happen to you if you try weed once).

Maybe we can't stop the society from operating from their own interests, but perhaps there should be some other source of objective information available to even young people?

... It's been such a long time since I've been in a drug education event, but yeah. It doesn't really help with forming a fact-based world view but I guess people who are interested in drugs and are responsible will find their information anyways. It doesn't really justify all the bullshit but the society isn't our friend in any other area when it comes to using drugs either. Well, it's getting better all the time.

One very important question I have in mind is, is that is there any developmental psychological evidence for why they use "the mental manipulation" -technique rather than tell facts? Or is it just a remain? There would be some very scary facts to share as well, but usually they just tell the old "peeling orange" -stories.

/r/Drugs Thread