Drug use is worrying normalizes alcoholism and the effects of many substances before linked to trivialize certain social marginality. With the neglect of the Lost Generation of the 80s, adolescents of today they are using drugs, but without fear and routinely, as common and normal. Educational plans fail again and again; but never have been able to be proud of and proud of a low consumption of drugs in our country, it seems that the situation now could become more worrying … How to approach reality?
Drugs means many things
Normally in the educational activities of schools and colleges we focus on “hard drugs” such as heroin or cocaine, or in certain “soft drugs” such as hashish or marijuana, obviating many other substances equal to or more dangerous: the Alcohol, for example, is more accessible, more common, much cheaper and consumption is considerably superior to that of any other psychoactive substance in the youth, but educational activities dedicated to preventing alcoholism are slim. It is standardized, but perhaps too much. What plays today is to educate by example.
The reality is bad enough: no need to embellish it.
Perhaps this point is the most important of the three, but it is uncomfortable to read. Youth trivialize the effects of drug use because educational campaigns that were being made were so alarmist that often exaggerated the possible effects of substances and instead of educating, skittish and created, at the same time, some inclination towards forbidden, curiosity and a somewhat wishful thinking about the wonders that could act drugs at a cost of health risk that an adolescent is unable to calibrate adequately: it is known that the risk awareness of a person in his adolescence is still “distorted” (or there is little) and, hence, many reckless behavior.
Also coincides with the construction of identity and the simultaneous, need to identify with the group (although 20 years later we find it paradoxical): many drugs are linked to subcultures and social movements, such as marijuana or drug design. If overdone about the immediate damage, the threshold of addiction or any circumstances and the adolescent, when testing the drug, does not see the damage as has been told, the only thing that will play is that it has lied.
You may also like to read another article on WeiWeiCS: How to try to detect a case of Anorexia Nervosa in the classroom?
Education is necessarily REALISTIC: If you really want to end this scourge, we must educate avoiding lies, fallacies, emotional blackmail and specious arguments. We are seeing with our own eyes that do not work. We do not need more evidence that put fear is useless: we must change strategy and start telling the truth (and know, of course).
This individualistic perspective … it may be a mistake
If we want to teach values, in solidarity, to the young people have to jump far beyond the perspective of the individual damage that may infringe a substance : few programs have taken into account, although they are now beginning to include damage level social that produces the drug; again, it is not only the social damage to our environment, from broken families or marginality: we must not fail to stress upon these aspects but we cannot forget that drug trafficking is what has ruined the lives of many and many farmers in Latin America or the Middle East, which is a cause of labor exploitation and slavery in the Third World, people who processed cocaine or heroin that comes into West are jeopardizing their health and living conditions inhumane and undignified work, which is the cause of thousands of murders and kidnappings, unjust land grabs, etc. The drug has bloodstained hands: not only the people who eat them, their families or their environment. His shadow extends around the world and nobody would want to collaborate with it.
