The fight against teen drug use is a longstanding one, and lack of proper education serves no purpose but to make that fight more difficult. According to Kaiser Family Foundation, from 2018 to 2022, deaths caused by drug overdose among adolescents more than doubled, from 253 in 2018 to 723 in 2022, and these deaths were largely driven by a synthetic opioid called fentanyl. Programs like Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) that focus on abstinence simply did not work, and instead of trying to stop kids from using any drugs ever, which has been proven to not be effective, drug education should focus on what you should do if you do say yes to drugs.
Schools should be teaching students how to say no to drugs. Those skills can be very valuable in potential future situations, but it is also important to teach things like how to know when to stop, what combinations of recreational drugs can be dangerous taken together, and how to test for things like fentanyl, which has led to a rise in deaths by overdose in recent years.
You can teach kids about peer pressure and how to say “no” all you want, but in adolescence, people get curious, and if someone says yes, they are suddenly in completely uncharted territory. That is something that can and should be fixed by updating curriculums to have honest, healthy conversations about drug use.
Another big issue is that if you paint drug use as some terrible thing that will get a teen arrested in every scenario, or even killed, then if someone does use drugs, they will not feel safe going to adults about it. Seeking help with drug abuse and addiction is hard enough if you are an adult, but it is a kid that has only ever been told that drug use is awful and should be punished, then there is no way they would feel comfortable or safe getting the help they need.
A concern that a lot of adults bring up about their kids is whether discussing drug use more in health classes will make their kid more likely to try them out, but really, that is not always the case. Proper teaching on a subject can only lead to more informed and safe decisions. If there is no discussion of drugs in school at all, then a teen’s only way to learn is through the internet or experimenting in a potentially unsafe way.
An article by the American Addiction Centers states that for a majority of people, the most effective way to discourage drug use is to learn about the real dangers and effects of substance use and abuse, followed by testimonials from recovered addicts. Instead of simply telling students not to do something, the curriculum should go into detail on why not.
In the same article, the American Addiction Centers asked 500 young adults what common substances they were educated about in school. Over half of the participants said that they did not receive any kind of education on heroin or opioids, and just under half reported that they did not receive education about methamphetamines. Some adolescents don’t even know what methamphetamines are, and that’s dangerous. If a teen was never educated on what something is, then they have no way of knowing how dangerous and addictive it could be. It is things like that that need to be changed, because not covering those topics is dangerous.
It is a very nuanced issue. There are so many stances that can be taken on the topic of drug education in schools, and many people agree that it should be changed, but more people need to get involved. Bring the topic up for discussion with people in your life, and help people learn about the issue. Someday, teens using or abusing drugs will be a thing of the past, and that starts with drug education discussing the “what-ifs” of saying yes.