Just Say No Again

The old failures of new and improved anti-drug education

Renee Moilanen from the January 2004 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

The students are asked why they think kids use drugs.

They respond in unison, "Peer pressure" -- the answer they know is expected. When asked to explain what this means, the students conjure up images of older kids hassling younger ones. "Sometimes they're your friends, but sometimes they're crazy people that come up and ask if you want some," one boy says, drawing on concepts that prevailed during the Just Say No era but have little basis in real life.

One boy defines peer pressure as other students "trying to force you, trying to convince you to do it." When asked if he's ever experienced peer pressure, he shakes his head. He's waiting for a group of sinister strangers to thrust drugs in his face. Drug education apparently has not helped him realize that peer pressure is far subtler, like wearing the same clothes as your friends or sharing inside jokes. And the teachers, by continuing to portray peer pressure as a palpable evil, fail to protect their students from anything.

Everything Old Is New Again

Today's anti-drug programs claim to have replaced all the scare tactics of years past with good, solid information about the physiological effects of drug use. But these programs, which are based on the same flawed "scientific" information that adults have been using for years to keep kids off drugs, are a lot like anti-alcohol propaganda from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Back in the late 1800s, health lessons endorsed by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and its Department of Scientific Instruction portrayed alcohol as a wicked poison that created an uncontrollable appetite for more: "Many persons who at first take only a little beer, cider, or wine, form a great desire for them....The appetite for alcoholic liquors usually grows rapidly, and men who use but little at first often become drunkards in a short time." This selection comes from The House I Live In, a schoolbook written in 1887 and heartily endorsed by the WCTU.

A century later, another popular textbook offers a similar perspective on drug use. This passage comes from Making Life Choices (1999), lauded by teachers for its scientific content: "Attachment to the drug becomes almost like a great love relationship with another person. The only sure way to escape drug addiction is never to experiment with taking the drugs that produce it."

In the popular classroom video Marijuana Updates, produced in 1997, teenagers and Leo Hayden, a former college football player turned drug counselor, describe how pot ruined their lives. They say the drug made them feel invincible, tired, hungry, and numb. Soon they were slacking off in school, shirking responsibilities, and turning to harder drugs for a better high. Their testimonials, which suggest that pot turns people into useless zombies eager to snort cocaine and shoot heroin, draw on two major themes in anti-marijuana propaganda: "amotivational syndrome" and the "gateway effect."

A century ago, kids heard the same warnings about tobacco, another target of the so-called temperance movement. Our Bodies and How We Live (1904) warned that "the mind of the habitual user of tobacco is apt to lose its capacity for study or successful effort." According to the 1924 Primer of Hygiene, a smoker "forgets the importance of the work he has to do, and idles away his time instead of going earnestly to work to finish his task." The Essentials of Health (1892) worried that cigarettes would lead to harder stuff: "It is to be feared that if our young men continue the use of cigarettes we shall soon see, as a legitimate result, a large number of adults addicted to the opium habit."

The scientific studies allegedly proving the effectiveness of the new drug education programs aren't much more impressive than the tired rhetoric. Consider Life Skills Training, a fast-growing program that reaches about 2 percent of the nation's 47 million schoolchildren and tops the list of "exemplary" programs. Generally touted as the future of drug education, Life Skills Training purports to cut tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use by up to 75 percent; to reduce the use of multiple drugs by two-thirds; and to decrease the use of inhalants, narcotics, and hallucinogens. These claims aren't based on testimonials or case studies about 12-year-old Johnny turning his life around after a few Life Skills Training lessons. The program's supporters cite actual scientific studies, reported in journals published by the American Medical Association and American Psychological Association.

But the lead scientist on those evaluations, Cornell University epidemiologist Gilbert Botvin, is the creator of Life Skills Training and the one profiting from its success. Botvin also sits on the expert panel that deemed his prevention program "exemplary." He is not the only program developer sitting on the expert panel; two other panelists have participated in rating prevention programs they helped develop. All of their programs have received "exemplary" marks.

Such conflicts of interest aren't proof that the conclusions are flawed. But independent researchers such as Joel Brown at the Center for Educational Research and Development in Berkeley have found problems with the Life Skills Training studies. Brown charges that the evaluations often focused only on positive outcomes and omitted results indicating that teenagers who went through the prevention program were more likely to use drugs or alcohol than their peers.

You Gotta Believe

In a 2001 analysis published by the Journal of Drug Education, Brown noted that a six-year evaluation of Life Skills Training reported data only from students who had completed 60 percent or more of the curriculum, just two-thirds of the original 2,455-student sample. The students left out were the ones who missed many of the anti-drug lessons -- probably students who skipped class a lot or were less motivated. Such students, other research suggests, would be especially prone to drug use. Carving them out of the picture inflated the program's apparent effectiveness, Brown's study shows.

Brown also found that when students completed anything less than 60 percent of the Life Skills Training curriculum, even 59 percent, their drug use was no lower, and in many cases higher, than that of students who did not participate in any lessons at all. Since the researchers don't give a good reason for using 60 percent as the cutoff point (only saying it was "a reasonably complete version of the intervention"), it seems they simply chose the point at which the outcomes turned positive.