Well, you know, that's because actual facts are too inconvenient for the clue free morons who want to tell us how to live.

They'd rather close their eyes and pretend that there is some kind of world out there where the average citizen will willingly suck up to those who proclaim themselves our betters.

They always freak out when they realize that most people don't view them that way.

Shame he didn't comment on the uselessness of promoting abstinence from sex to prevent teen pregnancies as well. May as well piss a few more people off.

@Ltw - absolutely. Like the comments to articles about the vaccination that prevents cervical cancer: there are always a few nutcases who vehemently object, because *their* kids would *never* have sex.

Sure, some kids won't do drugs or get drunk. But somewhere in that group of kids are those who will, and an honest discussion will have helped them.

Head-in-sand idiots. They ought to be laughed out of town, but instead they will probably get this guy punished somehow. Because, you know, to oppose their views means that you support drunkenness and drug abuse.

I'm not a fan of MADD.

Sure they had noble intentions, but they've gone way to far off the deep end for me.

The cold hard truth is that people are going to fuck up.

And if somebody makes a bad decision while they're drunk, as long as they didn't kill somebody, there is no reason to punish them for life as if they had.

If we want to talk to kids about alcohol, sex, or drugs, we will do them, and ourselves, no favors to simply embrace the pretense that no decent person, ourselves included, has ever made foolish decisions about those things.

Talking abstinance is not a bad thing, but it is unrealistic to expect it to be universally embraced by the hot blooded young. Therefore while it should be talked of, we must also speak plainly about safety and the actual real world options out there.

I think you've touched on something important, Robert, in terms of balance. While it's surely unrealistic to demand nothing less than total abstinence from alcohol, sex, drugs, etc., is it terribly useful to tell young people that yes, we know you're going to get ripped and have sex, so just make sure you do it safely? Seems to me that there's a useful middle in there somewhere, but it's a moving target, and different for every kid -- a real challenge for parents.

@RPM
I think that last sentence is part of the point. As far as an education in school goes, all options and information should be on the table. If PARENTS want their child to not have sex until they're married, or to never use drugs, it's upto the parents to instill those values in their own children. It shouldn't be up to the school, or MADD or a judge to instill those values, just to lay out information and facts.
That should include, as an option, complete abstinence from all of the above mentioned. But it shouldn't be the only option presented.

Uh, you know a really good way to get kids to want try smoking pot? Get them all in a cafeteria together and have a criminal judge ask them to raise their hand if they've ever tried smoking pot.

The media and popular culture have already created an overblown sense of how frequently teenagers drink and use drugs. And if your one of the (many) that does not, there's nothing more likely to make you feel like a freak than having to raise your hand and identify yourself as such. I'll bet that more than one kid went off after that with a newly resolved desire to try weed. I've read that for this same reason, studies show that drug education programs like D.A.R.E. actually have the opposite effect: they introduce students to drugs they might never have heard of, make those drugs sounds really appealing, and make it sound like everyone is doing them, essentially acting as a marketing campaign for the very substances they're trying to condemn. (I've heard the same about PSA-type programs about anorexia and bulimia: they're basically a how-to manual for aspiring anorexics and bulimics.)

That doesn't mean that adults and educators need to act like _nobody_ is drinking or taking drugs (we've seen how well abstinence-only education works, right?) but they also need to be careful not to inadvertently "peer pressure" kids into the very behavior they would wish them to avoid. I think that Judge Stanley's approach would have worked well with college students, who already have ample opportunity to drink and use drugs if they chose and are unlikely to feel pressured into doing so just to look cool, but I agree that it may not be appropriate for a high school audience.

Why are we supposed to accept that abstinence education should be laughed away because "kids are going to have sex' but alcohol abstinence education gets MADD all hot for leather? News flash: kids are going to drink just as much as they're going to have sex, if not more.

Newsflash-not all of them. I can count the number of times I even tasted alcohol on one hand before I turned 21. I had sex exactly twice before my first husband, and one was rape. Assuming all kids are going to do X is stupid, and kids need people talking honestly about the fact that not all kids do.

Uh, you know a really good way to get kids to want try smoking pot? Get them all in a cafeteria together and have a criminal judge ask them to raise their hand if they've ever tried smoking pot.

Nah. Kids who have sex and do drugs young do so for lots of reasons. I had DARE in grade school, and even sex ed in middle school and high school, and all I ever did was smoke pot a few times in college, and I lost my virginity at 21. Didn't drink at all until college, either. It's a mistake to think any of these programs is so powerful, for good or for bad.

I've said before that my dad always offered us a taste of what he was drinking

That's how my parents handled alcohol, too. I always got a taste of whatever I wanted. When I got to college and could drink legally, I didn't see any appeal to binge drinking.

@Shannon I completely agree that the whole hand-raising thing was unnecessary. Peer pressure is a powerful thing. I imagine about half of my classmates would have raised their hands, and they would have been the "cool" kids. For a middle schooler, that makes drugs all the more enticing.

I had D.A.R.E. twice (once in 5th grade, once in 8th or 9th). And it was useless. The message is: "Don't drink alcohol or smoke pot ever. Even once. If you drink a drop of alcohol before you turn 21 or smoke weed EVER in your life, you will die immediately."

When a fourth of the class is high at that very moment (it used to be a "thing" at my school to smoke up before DARE), they know the DARE instructor is full of it because they just smoked an hour ago and are NOT dead. So how much do you want to bet they're going to take that instructor seriously?

When I was a teacher at a school in Massachusetts, school policy was that if kids ever asked if we'd tried pot or other drugs, we had to say no.

Which is funny, because a lot of the teachers were big ole hippies.

Well, Amy, MonicaP, my parents had much the same attitude. I got drunk at 15 on New Year's Eve at home on most of a bottle of champagne, swore I'd never do it again. Got to taste a bit of wine etc growing up, never much.

20 years later I'm a full-blown alcoholic. Go figure. I don't think it makes a blind bit of difference what your parents do, not when it comes to the more extreme end that is.

>Uh, you know a really good way to get kids to want try smoking pot? Get them all in a cafeteria together and have a criminal judge ask them to raise their hand if they've ever tried smoking pot

Creeping like a communist, it's knocking on our doors
Turning all our children into hooligans and whores!
Voraciously devouring the way things are today
Savagely deflowering the good old USA!

Shannon... funny you mention the eating disorders thing. I was bulimic for many years (now I still over eat but am too lazy to binge and purge, now I binge and nap), and I got the idea for self-induced vomiting from an episode of "Different Strokes". I then went to the school library and read up on bulimia, looked at the stats and saw that the risk of death was low (around 1% if I remember right, much lower than anorexia which was around 7%) and decided it was worth it.

Yes... I was a fuck-up, but I was a nerdy fuck-up.

LTW wrote:

Go figure. I don't think it makes a blind bit of difference what your parents do, not when it comes to the more extreme end that is.

I have to agree. I had my first drink at 16 when I was bartending at my parents' mortgage burning party. They had a relaxed attitude toward alcohol and the drinking age here is 18. I drank hard for 15 years, nearly every day for the last 5 or 6. Nothing to do with my parents or anyone else. I drank because I needed to.

I'm with steamer and LTW,I'd be dead or a heroin addict if it werent for my pathological need to be in control of myself overpowering my addictive traits.

Its a shame that judge had to put the idea of smoking pot into all those innocent heads. I'm sure they were all going to Bible study later that day but decided to smoke a J instead.

People need to stop treating kids like morons. Show them a little respect and honesty and you'll have a kid who gives the same in return. Treat the kid like drugs don't exist and you never did anything wrong in your life, and you'll probably end up with a kid who will pretend too.

Shame he didn't comment on the uselessness of promoting abstinence from sex to prevent teen pregnancies as well.

I'm in favor of promoting abstinence as a way of preventing teen pregnancies. Abstinence is the only method with a 100% success rate.

However....

Abstinence-only education is the issue. It's putting all your eggs into one very fragile basket After all, abstinence is entirely dependent upon teenagers exercising self-control.

y'know? There isn't a one size fits all, or even most for these situations, and it's a mistake to look through the lens of "most of you will prolly try this..."

Instead a judge could say something like "someone in this audience may try this, but you should know there will be consequences. For example, end up in my courtroom, and expect to have me throw the book at you. On the other hand, you could be unlucky and end up dead, or end up killing your friends, or the baby of someone you don't even know. Then I will throw the book at you, you will feel guilty for the damage you have done. Any way you cut it, it's stupid."

Scared the piss out of everyone in my highschool when they put what was left of a student's car on the front entry. You could certainly still see the blood. That was even back in the day when people rarely wore seatbelts [early 80's] My first car '59 Nash Rambler didn't even have seatbelts. After that wreck, I installed some. There were a lot more house parties and a lot less drunk driving for a while.

But only for a while.

Ultimately they need to change up these messages every few years because they get stale... but to also realize that your parent say "No" but your uncle says "be careful" and it HAS to be that way. You need BOTH messages to get the point across.

Offtopic datapoint. (I supposed Amy's going to be insufferable about this from now on....)

And we wouldn't put up with that shit if you weren't apparently, y'know, right.

> I always got a taste of whatever I wanted. When
> I got to college and could drink legally, I
> didn't see any appeal to binge drinking.

Amy makes that case too, but I credit it not at all: There's no reason to think you were destined for alcoholism, or even misbehavior.

People often behave as childishly as they can get away with; They look at civilization's many hypocrisies and presume they're SUPPOSED to push the boundaries. And nobody really believes kids aren't going to have opportunities to drink until they turn 21. The laws are just written this way to make it clear to them that they're dealing with something hazardous.

So there's a lot to be said for talking to them about it in a straightforward way, and tallying them on the adult side of the project... Much like confirming a kid's suspicion that there's no Santa Claus, while explaining that his parents love him very much and what him to behave like a good little boy.

There's no secret truth out there, OK? No magical forces or cosmic bolt of illumination that's going to make the world easier to deal with. So welcome to reality, Kiddo, and good luck out there.

When it comes to sexual abstinence, at least, sooner or later the teachers will have to admit the following. (BTW, never having sat through such a course, I have no idea how the teacher could impress a class full of hostile secular kids who already know perfectly well that abstinence prevents pregnancy and most STDs! Can anyone tell me how such teachers try to do that?)

1. That, assuming you'd RATHER be abstinent, abstinence is a minor struggle only if you're very lucky. I.e., if you're already surrounded by non-nosy classmates who don't try to push you into anything, you're lucky.

2. That in all likelihood, you won't be that lucky, and if you live in a bad, tough neighborhood, chances are BOTH sexes will make your life miserable for refusing to conform to others' bad habits in general - including shoplifting, for example - until you move away for good. In other words, prepare to lose almost all of your "friends" for four years.

3. That whether it's a minor or major struggle for you, abstinence is still only about prevention, not about getting any swift rewards for your hard work. I.e., there is no guarantee that you will find anyone who WANTS to marry you before you turn 30 or 40, whether you abstain or not.

4. Both sex and abstinence have one thing in common - either can make you think you're in love when you're not. This is why you cannot use the agony of abstinence as an excuse to marry at 18 or even 20.

And, regarding drugs:

Given what I said above in point 2, I think adults should be a bit more sympathetic to kids who expect praise for staying away from drugs and alcohol.

And to those parents who believe that their smart kids wouldn't be failing in school right now if it weren't for pot, I say: Never underestimate teens' fear of growing up - or their creativity in avoiding adult responsibilities. There have always been kids, after all, who managed to ruin their grades with nothing more than too much TV or skateboarding. It's a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

Finally, I remember a study in San Francisco from an early 1990s edition of "American Psychology". They said that those teens who abstained completely did so because they tended to be timid wallflowers who were fearful of losing control and so didn't take risks in general - and weren't too successful in general, either. Whereas, popular, confident kids might USE drugs, but were unlikely to ABUSE them because they cared about their futures, while those who abused drugs did so because they already had no confidence in their futures. Ergo, telling kids to "just say no" doesn't cut it, since those who need to hear it the most don't listen.

What I'd tell kids about pot: "It's dangerous only because if you get caught, the cops will punish you the same as if you'd just mugged someone. Now grow up and vote libertarian, so we can change these stupid laws."

What I'd tell kids about pot: "It's dangerous only because if you get caught, the cops will punish you the same as if you'd just mugged someone.

This made me LOL, and the water I was drinking barely missed my keyboard.

I'll bet that more than one kid went off after that with a newly resolved desire to try weed.

It was the 1967 Newsweek pot issue that got to me...I totally did not want to miss out on all that!

"They said that those teens who abstained completely did so because they tended to be timid wallflowers who were fearful of losing control and so didn't take risks in general - and weren't too successful in general, either. Whereas, popular, confident kids might USE drugs, but were unlikely to ABUSE them because they cared about their futures, while those who abused drugs did so because they already had no confidence in their futures."

Maybe the people I know are all outliers. I suppose the first description fit me in high school. But I also didn't try drugs because I had some common sense: I didn't like the taste of beer and the delights of drinking until you threw up escaped me, and I could see who the stoners were and didn't want to be like them. I did well enough to graduate early from high school, serve in the Air Force, earn a BS in engineering, and pass the eight-hour Fundamentals of Engineering exam.

My "confident, popular" nephews the family had such high hopes for, who started drinking and taking drugs? One of them washed out of both college and Navy basic training. The other used to have a personality. At 40 and 42, they're both still drinking, still getting high, can't keep a job, and as far as I know, don't support their kids.

I think the important thing is to have standards for yourself: you go to class, you don't black out, you keep a job, you support your kids, you don't make a fool of yourself. You quit doing anything that gets in the way of those.

There will be people who overindulge in any substance, but I think a lot of the college binge drinking that goes on is about all of a sudden having "the forbidden."

Funnily enough Amy, I agree with you, at least in the sense that I'm an outlier. I certainly don't blame my parents (or anyone else for that matter) and shouldn't be taken as an example in this case. And there's no need to be sorry! (although you can feel for my ex's and family if you like, living with an addict is not fun. Luckily they mostly still love me.)

I've seen a lot of people go through the binge stage at college then settle down though - so I'm not certain whether the early exposure makes much difference in the long run. In the short term of drunk driving accidents, teen pregnancies, etc, sure. But the ones who aren't really vulnerable will probably avoid the long term addiction no matter what.

Amy- I trust you get a share of whatever wealth accrues from this