Education Should Focus on Stopping Drug Use Before It Starts | Opinion

Efforts to prevent drug use and encourage kids to live free from drugs have come under increased attack. Rather than building on science and common sense, some have begun advocating for an unproven approach to prevention that aims to not prevent drug use at all—instead it educates children on how to use drugs. Policymakers should reject these inherently flawed initiatives and instead scale up evidence-based prevention campaigns that emphasize the importance of living healthy, drug-free lives.

Agenda-driven activists have taken cheap shots at popular programs like D.A.R.E. and Just Say No, which were championed in the '80s and '90s to discourage drug use. Hindsight is always 20/20, but we should not toss the baby out with the bathwater. These campaigns were not flawless, but they conveyed important messages and saw usage rates decline.

In 1983, when D.A.R.E was established, a remarkable 47 percent of 12th graders were past-year users of "any illicit drug"––ranging from marijuana to cocaine to heroin. By 1990, this decreased by almost 15 percent, before increasing again by 2000. Twenty-two years later, we've made it back to 1990 numbers, with marijuana and hallucinogens now the most commonly used drugs.

Despite these positive outcomes, Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), a pro-drug legalization group, claims "programs like D.A.R.E. don't give students the tools they need to make safe decisions or to get help if problems with alcohol and other drugs do occur."

In response, the group, while backing failed policies like Measure 110 in Oregon, created a program called "Safety First," which it promotes as "the nation's first harm reduction-based drug education curriculum for high school students." A 2007 publication from Safety First argues that "drugs are an integral part of American life," and that "it is unrealistic to believe that at a time in their lives when they are most prone to risk-taking, teenagers—who find it exciting to push the envelope—will completely refrain from trying alcohol and/or other drugs."

This path aims to normalize drug use among kids, even though surveys consistently show the majority of kids do not use drugs. In fact, only 11.5 percent of 12–17-year-olds used marijuana––the most commonly used illicit drug––in 2022, meaning that nearly 9 in 10 did not (usage rates are higher in states where the drug is legalized, as expected). Additionally, among this group of young people, only 6.6 percent smoked cigarettes and 16.7 percent drank alcohol. The overwhelming majority of adolescents chose to remain abstinent from drugs, tobacco, and alcohol—an outcome with long-term benefits.

Fortunately, likely because it was so unpopular, DPA handed its curriculum over to prevention researchers at Stanford's REACH Lab, who we hope will modify it greatly. We are encouraged by recent conversations with the lab, now that it is in their hands.

It is vitally important for prevention campaigns to be grounded in evidence and best practices. This is why D.A.R.E. recently underwent a transformation to evolve with the latest research. Today the program focuses on decision-making processes, instead of statistics about drugs. Likewise, the CDC and White House Office of National Drug Control Policy jointly fund and administer the Drug-Free Communities prevention program—another well-constructed prevention campaign. We now know that "scare tactics" do not work. But we can learn from our experience with tobacco (like the well-regarded Truth Initiative) to teach kids about the power of a big industry to manipulate young brains into believing its product is safe.

A recent article in NPR spotlighting Safety First conceded that, unlike the new-and-improved D.A.R.E program, "there are few studies that focus on harm reduction drug education programs in schools, and more research is needed to evaluate their efficacy." In effect, such "harm reduction" education programs have been using our children as guinea pigs to test the legalization lobby's messages about drugs.

We ought to be skeptical of prevention curricula that are made by the same people who campaign for the legalization of all drugs––this is hardly different from the tobacco industry-funded prevention campaigns of the past that subsequently increased usage rates.

With more than 100,000 overdose deaths in the U.S. last year, it is more important than ever to stress the importance of abstinence. Rather than promoting the responsible use of drugs—an oxymoron—students must know that the responsible decision is to not use drugs. Amid the nation's unprecedented overdose and fentanyl crisis, it's now a life-or-death choice.

Dr. Kevin Sabet is the President of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) and a former drug policy advisor to Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.