This Is Your Country On Drugs

Salon’s Laura Miller reviews Ryan Grimm’s This is Your Country on Drugs: A Secret History of Getting High in America. Full disclosure: I was a D.A.R.E. poster child in elementary school and was nominated to read my essay in front of the entire school. I thought what I was saying was true and right and self-obvious. Now I know D.A.R.E. was mostly propaganda and my essay was the best regurgitation of that empty-rhetoric:

By now, most informed people know that anti-drug education and P.R. campaigns directed at children don’t work, but Grim has noted several studies indicating that they may actually foster experimentation. He sees the mini-boom in drug use among 10th graders in the late ’90s as caused by a confluence of the “inner child” therapy boom exhorting parents to encourage children’s curiosity and programs like D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), which inadvertently directed that curiosity toward exotic chemicals. Despite ample proof of its ineffectiveness, D.A.R.E. continues to be used in three-quarters of all American school districts on some 25 million children. (President Obama even proclaimed April 8 “National D.A.R.E. Day” in honor of the organization’s “important work.”) Grim thinks that D.A.R.E. and similarly wasteful programs persist simply because they relieve parents from the duty of having awkward (and possibly “hypocritical”) conversations with their kids about drugs. Also because no one knows what else to do.

I was a D.A.R.E. kid, and I drink like a fish (at the encouragement of hand-wringing liberal friends and conservative, god-fearing family), have tried drugs D.A.R.E. told me not to, and use cognitive enhancing drugs for off label uses. Another successful government program.