Dear Ameri-gays, tell me about D.A.R.E. and abstinence education.

You may find this thread about D.A.R.E. of interest.

Abstinence changed my life. So much so that I made a living out of lecturing high school kids on avoiding sex.

I suspect many of us on here are too old to have experienced this. DARE came along after I’d already graduated high school.

Pretty sure most of the kids targeted by these efforts saw the whole thing as a joke. I saw plenty of graffiti in school bathrooms such as:

DARE to do drugs!

DARE to shoot up!

(Later, when I was a teacher)

I went through it. Not the abstinence only stuff. My state taught both condoms and abstinence. But the D.A.R.E. stuff. There were two parts to what I experienced.

One was showing us movies that told us to avoid drugs. I remember one was of a rebellious teen who did cocaine. His parents came home to find him dead. They tried to do CPR, but to no avail. Anyway, the twist was that while that was a dramatization, the real parents were then shown crying about the loss of their son (as they had experienced this and surprise, this was a real story.) All of the movies were relatively poorly acted and all of the situations ended the worst way possible. If someone huffed something their first time, they did. Etc. Not very effective and some kids would make fun of these movies while they were going on.

The second part was actually educational. A hot-as-fuck police officer came to our class, passed out a bunch of D.A.R.E. freebies (bumper stickers, pencils, t-shirt to the first person to answer a question correctly, etc), then gave us a talk about drugs. Rather than do the "You'll drop dead if you use this stuff once" stuff, he said he wanted us to know what various stuff looked like so we would know what was serious and what wasn't. He opened up a briefcase full of drugs (I assume fake, lol) and drug paraphernalia and went one by one explaining what all the various pills, powders, and items were used for. He explained the effects on the human body. How it made you feel as well as the negatives, both immediate and long term. And yes, he also mentioned the prison sentences one could get for having various things. But the way he did it was just very matter-of-factly. Far better than the videos that we all laughed at. It was just here's the facts. Also, it helped that he was younger and actually aware of current drug slang. He chose the good cop approach and no kids laughed during his presentation.

In late 1980's Los Angeles the running joke was that anybody with a D.A.R.E. bumper sticker on their car was a drug dealer.

For any non-Americans who are wondering, DARE stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education.

I google so you don't have to.