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| @liakantrowitz |
DARE shirts have often been perverted into ironic props for angsty teenagers trying to prove to their friends that they're edgy. Even I can tell you that the whole program is often the subject of sarcastic jabs by people right before taking drugs. We either really love drugs or DARE just sucked.
Perhaps producing cartoons where the drugs were personified as over the top characters wasn't such an effective strategy. The tar filled jar passed around the room didn't strike the right note with students. You could even say that the "Drunk Goggles" were actually pretty fun. The truth is, DARE didn't have a substantial effect on how children viewed drugs. It was ineffective, boring, and honestly a lackluster job. In fact, an early study conducted by the University of Indiana showed that students that went through the DARE program went on to use hallucinogenic drugs more often than students who didn't. This program inadvertently sparked curiosity in people to do drugs later on.
Now we can't place all the blame on DARE for you being a shitty person. How could a government who has cannabis listed alongside heroin as a schedule one drug be taken seriously by the general public? In a country where drug use is becoming less taboo and often satirized, I wonder which government official's truly think that regurgitating religious scripts and repeating cheesy slogans is really going to stop people from smoking a joint.
The "war on drugs" has long been used as a guise to oppress minorities and provide a steady stream of profit to privatized prisons. Can we really be surprised that a hyper-capitalist country would push legislation to increase incarceration rates among minorities and make money at the same time? Nah.
Our tax money should be used to educate the future generations about mental help and provide support to those that need it. The solution isn't to punish those who use drugs but rather have programs in place to help those that are struggling with addiction.