Jonah came home with a red ribbon last week. “What’s this for, Jonah?” “You tie it on your tree and it stops drugs.” “What?” “A policeman did drugs and died, but he actually saved lives, because people told his story and stopped doing drugs.” “Ah.”
My 7 year old kid learned about drugs at school last week. Well, he mostly learned that mommy was going to die, because she pops open a beer at dinner time. So, we had to counteract the hysterics by teaching him about moderation. We talked about how one glass of wine a day has actually been shown to be good for your heart.
When Steve came home, I told him how he was going to get sick and die from his glass of microbrew. He said that Carrie Nation week was a one way ticket to binge drinking at 14.
When I was a kid, my Italian grandfather would give me a glass of water tinted red with wine at dinner time. That’s what his family did back in Abruzzi. On the other hand, Papa didn’t have a firm grasp of the whole moderation thing, so perhaps he isn’t the best role model. Still, I think that moderation isn’t such a tough concept, and it’s one that more American kids should learn at an earlier age, rather than face down in a toilet freshman year in college.
UPDATE: More from Allison Kaplan Sommer and Jane Galt.
Apt. 11d 
I’ve been surprised at how casually messages of near total abstinence when it comes to alcohol, tobacco, and drugs have been taken up by programs like D.A.R.E. in elementary and junior high schools. At first I thought it was just because our experiences with public schools had been solely in small southern and midwestern towns; I suppose the same might be said of what we’re hearing from our kids today, in Wichita, KS. But I don’t think so; I think it’s truly national. For any number of reasons, the progressive anti-drug campaign all across the country has somehow managed to appropriate and/or allow itself to be infiltrated by early 20th-century Protestant morality. (Except in regards to dancing and sex, of course.)
Given our own standards, I don’t mind. I agree, though, that teaching kids abstinence without teaching them the why of abstinence–which, of course, these kind of secular programs can’t do; all they can say is that drugs kill you, kill your friends, kill your mother, etc., etc.–is just setting them up for an overreaction later in life.
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We have two people who are very close to us who are alcoholics. They both hit rock bottom within the last three years. My children saw the destruction first-hand. For awhile (maybe a year) most of us that did the whole intervention were tea totalers in front of our kids. Then one day Bert and I decided that it was important for our kids to know that there are moderate drinkers. We drink a beer or martini maybe twice a month, usually with a meal. The kids see this, they see we are responsible and a drink on occassion isn’t always the path to a life of addiction. As for DARE and the like, our school doesn’t do it. We have other stuff that is more on making informed choices and being responsible than abstaining on everything. Don’t get me wrong, we do anti-drug stuff when we study the human body. “This is how X effects you, this is the consequence of taking Y.”
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I think that’s wise, Lisa. I mean, we’re teetotalers ourselves, and we want our children to be too, for religious reasons, but when we do talk about this stuff, we usually try to mention–in language they can understand–that our motivations aren’t the same as others’, and that responsible drinking is a possibility.
In theory, I suppose one could say the same thing about smoking. But for any number of reasons, tobacco use has become a huge public health concern–as well as a mark of upper class disapproval–while alcohol has not. You’ve got to at least give D.A.R.E. and similar programs some sort of credit for trying to throw everything–smoking, drinking, marijuana, harder drugs, etc.–under the same anti-addiction campaign.
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Carrie Nation Week:
“My 7 year old kid learned about drugs at school last week,” Laura at 11D tells us. “Well, he mostly learned that Mommy was going to die, because she pops open a beer at dinner time. So, we had to…
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I just have trouble with the moderation thing because *I* never did it well. At the end of the day, I drink because I like to catch a buzz. I never miss work, I never drive after drinking … but it still feels like there’s a little alky inside of me.
I so clearly remember in Traffic the high schooler who had no patience with her parents’ drug speeches because the parents had cocktails every night after work. So the teenager chose crack instead of booze? She could still tell their motivations were the same — they all wanted to forget their days. And I thought, am I so different? I still need this a little too much, especially in a crowd.
Can you tell I’m thoroughly steeped in Russell’s Protestant anti-drinking morality?
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I’m not sure that agree, Russell. I don’t think that mainlining heroin should be lumped with having a beer with dinner. There are even health benefits that come with a small amount of wine consumption. Wine and beer can be consumed responsibly and moderately, while it’s impossible to be moderate with smoking and hard drugs. You and your family have religious reasons for abstaining and I respect that. However, the message from the red ribbon campaign and D.A.R.E. is health based and factually untrue. It’s so extreme that I think that it doesn’t provide kids with the real tools that they’ll need later in life, which is moderation.
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I really liked Jen and Russell’s observations about the Protestant anti-drinking morality filtering into these D.A.R.E. campaigns. You know my dad has a book coming out next year, which shows the enduring puritan influence on American politics. I’ll have to pass on this observation to him.
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Wine and beer can be consumed responsibly and moderately, while it’s impossible to be moderate with smoking and hard drugs.
Laura, I think I disagree. If you define moderation as “on appropriate occasions, not interfering with everyday life or causing long-term health damage”, I don’t know of any intoxicant where that isn’t possible. I’ve known plenty of people who had a joint occasionally that were fully functional when they needed to be; plenty of people who smoked cigarettes when out with friends, or had a cigar on special occasions, and weren’t nicotine dependent (I’m in that class myself). I know of, but don’t know well, a fair number of people who have a line or two of coke at parties occasionally and are successful businessmen (actually, I’m surprised that you don’t know some of those people yourself–it used to be quite common in the Wall Street crowd).
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Laura,
“I’m not sure that agree, Russell. I don’t think that mainlining heroin should be lumped with having a beer with dinner.”
I’m sure you’re right; I don’t want to give the impression that I fully agree with their strategy. All I meant to say is that, from what I can observe, programs like DARE have just decided to give kids one blanket message about all addictive substances, rather than trying to explain all the differences and particulars between them. Maybe not entirely wise, but at least they’re consistent. (And really, parents and others whom the kids know and trust personally should be doing that kind of explaining.)
Jen,
“Can you tell I’m thoroughly steeped in Russell’s Protestant anti-drinking morality?”
Well, in my case it’s a Mormon anti-drinking morality, but it works out the same. It really is curious how an avowedly liberal program to “protect the children” has ended up sometimes sounding a lot like the Baptist preachers I used to know who worked to keep their (and our) community dry.
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You make me laugh, Russell. I’m closer to your morality than you’d think. I’m married to a jack Mormon who drank like an absolute fish until the kids were old enough to notice; now he’s back to his family’s traditional root beer. (And yes, we have piles and piles of canned goods in the basement.)
Moderation is a problem with lots of stuff in the States, IMHO. A nation that has discovered how to abuse whipping cream and cough medicine has, in my view, an addictive culture overall. The list is endless: video games, gambling, exercise, sex, TV, junk food, prescription drugs, shopping. And the thing is, once you’ve learned moderation with any of this stuff, you pretty much have it down. What’s the old saying, the middle path is always the hardest?
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Isn’t there a statoid (kind of like a statistic, but with no sourcing, and thus, I can’t tell you to rely on it — but I think I saw it cited in a WaPo column), that says that drug use has gone up at the same time that the anti-drug commercials have been most aggressive? (The column used this correlation to suggest causation, but I can’t stoop that low, even to make a point).
I hate the anti-drug ads that exaggerate, because they seem essentially illogical to me, and I think my kids are smart enough to realize that too. For example: there’s a anti-marijuana advert that shows a girl in the bathroom, cuts to a pregnancy test, and then to disappointed parents. I think the implied logic is marijuana -> bad decisions -> teen pregnancy. But, come one, marijuana definitely doesn’t cause pregnancy, and the commericial doesn’t make the logic clear.
I guess this is the same as Russel’s comment — No without a why doesn’t make sense; whys are more complicated when they have to be secular, but there are secular whys and without them, I think the message will ultimately get lost.
bj
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May I add blogging on to Jen’s list of dangerous addictions?
Look, I have an addictive personality. So does my husband. Both of us have drunks hanging off every limb of our family tree. We can find addictions in everything from video games to food to work to blogging. My kids need to learn how to control themselves at an early age. That’s a much more useful lesson for them than temperance.
Sam — I’m not sure if all things can be handled moderately. It may also depend on personalities. Jane Galt just wrote that she could be moderate about alcohol, but not smokes. I’ve never seen anybody do coke responsibly, so I’m not sure if that is possible.
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My sister had a similar reaction in elementary school when she learned about the dangers of smoking. At the time my mom was smoking a pack a day (as she had while she was pregnant with both of us) and my sister used to wake up with nightmares that my mom was going to die of cancer. That was actually the catalyst my mother needed (this was the early 80s), and she quit smoking cold turkey one day.
Of course, moderate drinking is radically different even than moderate smoking. I don’t think the two should be lumped together by educators.
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“I hate the anti-drug ads that exaggerate, because they seem essentially illogical to me, and I think my kids are smart enough to realize that too.”
I agree, and my sympathy for what DARE is doing–which isn’t huge, but is there, I admit–drops dramatically when I see manipulation of information and scare tactics. All of that, in my view, is the result a desperate desire to ramp up their “why you shouldn’t take X” argument when, in fact, they have precious little behind it. The more complete and sophisticated they try to make the argument, the worse the blowback may be. I don’t mind a general, blanket argument against addictive substances–“they’re bad!”–that forms a baseline as part of our public expectations; I see that as something that parents can work with. (For what it’s worth, in my experience this is what most dry communites are like–selling liquor is considered bad, but it’s obtained and consumed nonetheless as people so choose.) And I don’t mind introducing more and better information about health and addition issues as kids get older; in fact, I would expect that. But if what you have is a message existing in a vaccuum, trying to lump all sorts of evils together because it can’t leave well enough alone and can’t appeal to anything outside itself–in other words, if you just have people saying that “it’s bad” in increasingly terrifying ways–then all you’re likely doing is creating more and more desire for the forbidden fruit.
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A few weeks ago a student counseling person came into my classroom to talk about alcohol awareness week. After she left, I turned to the class and told them I have such mixed feelings about this because I think drinking alcohol is perfectly fine. I know there’s abuse of alcohol, and that’s not fine, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with alcohol. They seemed pretty surprised to hear me say this.
We’ll be teaching our kids moderation, too.
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As a counter-example…
I graduated from public high school in 2000, so I had a heavy dose of DARE and MADD both programs, and I’m in favor of them. For me, there was no more effective deterrant to substance abuse than seeing pictures and videos of people who made themselves very, very sick by drinking or smoking. Photos and stories of kids who were killed by drunk drivers were pretty powerful, too.
I don’t smoke, drink or use drugs — I’ve never even tried — and I’m certainly not alone among my friends. Youth drug use is down (http://www.samhsa.gov/news/newsreleases/060907_nsduh.aspx), and I don’t doubt that DARE and MADD programs have helped that decline.
DARE is right to teach that even one episode of drunk driving or a single coke overdose can ruin or end your life — Laura, there are some things that just can’t be safely done in moderation.
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The thing about DARE is, how dare they keep doing it when two studies of former DARE participants shows they are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol than kids who have not been through DARE, and all the other studies show no effect (i.e., DARE kids are just as likely to abuse as non-DARE kids). The program costs a bundle and it is at best worthless at achieving its stated goal.
http://www.fff.org/comment/ed0900g.asp
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I think this is all part of a long tradition of terrorizing children in schools — viz the nuclear attack practices in the 50s and 60s, and the firefighter visits (“does your family have an escape plan?”). WHo cares what the outcome is, the point is to instill fear and sort the goats from the sheep (or whatever).
So, although not quite a teetotaller, I’m strongl;y sympathetic with the teetotal view, and would like it to be presented as an acceptable choice in schools. It isn’t. Everyone knows their parents drink, and the “Just Say No” message is so much less effective at reducing future binge drinking, because it is manifestly hypocritical, in the absence of values-informed explanations, than a message of moderation (with the rider that for some people abstinence is just better). Who sponsors this stuff?
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“Everyone knows their parents drink, and the ‘Just Say No’ message is so much less effective at reducing future binge drinking, because it is manifestly hypocritical, in the absence of values-informed explanations, than a message of moderation (with the rider that for some people abstinence is just better).”
Harry, I completely agree with what you’re saying; the need for these sorts of messages to be accompanied by “values-informed explanations” is very important. Without such an accompaniment, I suspect that most of these programs inevitably fall into hysterics. That being said, I think Mrs. Ewer’s experience has to be taken into consideration–namely, that however limited or even counter-productive value-neutral “scare” messages are in terms of actually teaching many (maybe even most) kids to make good decisions, the fact is that straightforward warnings about additive substances do form a useful backdrop for kids in their subsequent dealings with the issue. DARE is anything but perfect–I’ve acknowledged that from the beginning–but I don’t think, in its clumsy, overreaching way, it completely fails to present abstinence as, as you say, “an acceptable choice.”
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Wow, Laura, another great discussion.
This is my problem with DARE- and I have very limited first-hand experience with it- is that schools can choose to use whatever parts they want. I have been at many grant meetings where state anti-drug coordinators have begged districts to “please not use ALL their grant money on Red Ribbon Week DARE parties.” Many schools have a cop come and talk in a school assembly, then have a week of games and prizes – wear read and get candy!
Now the irony, we have to do oodles of paper work to get them to pay for a health program or a series of programs on self esteem and good decision making. However if we applied for a grant saying we wanted matching red t-shirts for the whole school, we would get them in a heartbeat with only a receipt.
I think some of the anti-drug commercials are effective, mostly for those of us who have used drugs. The one with 40 year old guys sitting around in their mom’s basement is great. They are sitting there smoking grass and mom yells “Johnny did you get a job today?” The guy yells back “No, Mom, nothing happened.” Then the announcer says “Marijuana, nothing happens.” We know a half-dozen aging hippies who could have starred in this commercial.
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“A few weeks ago a student counseling person came into my classroom to talk about alcohol awareness week. After she left, I turned to the class and told them I have such mixed feelings about this because I think drinking alcohol is perfectly fine. I know there’s abuse of alcohol, and that’s not fine, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with alcohol. They seemed pretty surprised to hear me say this.”
I assume you teach at a college. If you teach at a high school or elementary school, I’d probably be setting up an appointment with your boss to ask why you are giving these messages to students.
Even as a college professor, the fact is that or most of your students are breaking the law when they drink. Breaking the law in moderation won’t get you out of jail. Alcohol awareness with college students is rarely about abstinence, but about responsibility. The reality is that the younger people are when they begin to drink–even modeeratly–the more likely they to become troubled drinkers.
As a public health approach, moderation is a tight rope. Your idea of moderation may be one drink a week, but another person’s definition of moderation may be five drinks a night. Almost every alcoholic at one time was convinced they drank in moderation and were social drinkers. So how public health send the moderation message when no one can actually define the term?
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There’s a big difference between driving drunk and having a glass of wine with dinner. I never have a drink with I’m going to drive and am very hard line about that. I was lucky enough to live in a city with subways in my 20s, so it was never much of an issue. I do support educational programs that are hardline about drinking and driving. However, the program that my kid saw wasn’t about drinking and driving. They were lecturing kids who were as young as five. They were indoctrinating young kids with half truths to go home and preach to their parents. It’s a little creepy in my opinion.
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WendyW does not appear to have said to students that their drinking alcohol was fine; she appears to have said that drinking alcohol in general was fine, whereas abuse was not. Students need to hear this kind of message long before they are of legal drinking age. It’s better, of course, if they see real-life examples before then, too, but WendyW was not in the least out of line.
As to what the legal drinking age should be, that is another debate entirely. (It does not speak well of the law that it criminalizes behavior that the vast majority of people engage in.)
And half-truths to preach to the parents is more than a little creepy; it’s practically Soviet.
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“There’s a big difference between driving drunk and having a glass of wine with dinner.”
I can’t believe this even needs to be said. But anyway, well said.
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“Students need to hear this kind of message long before they are of legal drinking age.”
Actually, no they don’t. College students, maybe. Younger than that, I don’t want teachers promoting drinking, whether it’s a single glass of wine or a 48-hour binge. That’s my decision, not a teachers.
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I teach college, so the point is moot, no? 😉 I often express to my students my wish that the drinking age was 18 again. They are generally amused and amazed when I tell them I was 18 years old when the drinking age was changed to 21; I was able to drink legally for 9 months when I was 18. Not that I ever drank very much.
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“There’s a big difference between driving drunk and having a glass of wine with dinner.”
This isn’t totally true for inexperienced drinkers and lightweight women — which describes a lot of college girls.
There was a woman recently arrested, handcuffed, and put in jail in D.C. for having a BAC of 0.3. She drank just one glass of wine (with dinner, of course). The District has a zero-tolerance policy for anyone driving with a measurable BAC.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/11/AR2005101101968_pf.html
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I just stumbled across this, which seems apt.
As an australian, I’d say messages of moderation work much better than messages of total abstinence, both because of the need not to provoke a rebellion reaction, and the need not to set up the “if you have one drink / reefer your only option is to slide totally into the pit” mindset.
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