What Would Nancy Reagan Say? –
OCTOBER 26, 2019 – Safety First, a drug education curriculum developed by policy reformers promoting harm reduction, a broad set of ideas and practices rooted in the understanding that some people — including youth — will encounter and possibly use drugs for a variety of reasons, even if drug use is discouraged or criminalized.Instead of “just say no” propaganda, harm reduction reduces risks by helping people make the healthiest choices based on evidence-based research, without judgement. Abstinence is the most direct choice to avoid drug risks, and the Safety First curriculum discusses abstinence and generally discourages drug use. But the program is also realistic. “Drugs are not always great for you, but people who use them are not bad people and you will probably encounter them in your life,” Miller said in an interview. At first glance, Safety First looks a bit like the drug education I remember from high school and middle school, except scare tactics have been replaced with useful facts about how drugs work and why the government made some of them illegal (hint: the history of drug prohibition is steeped in racism and classism). I took a close look at Safety First’s unit on marijuana, the most widely-used drug among teens after alcohol. Older adolescents are more likely to use marijuana, with 5 percent of eight graders reporting marijuana use in the past month, compared to 23 percent of 12th graders, according to a 2016 government survey.
