If you grew up in the 1980s and 90s you will remember the JUST SAY NO campaign spearheaded by then First Lady, Nancy Reagan. Televisions commercial were laughable, in one someone held up an egg and said "This is your brains", cracks it and lets the contents hit a hot frying pan saying "This is your brain on drugs, any questions?" This like the push a generation earlier when it came the health risks of smoking, tried to get kids to see the long-term consequences of their short-term enjoyment. Maybe one of the most of the most celebrated attempts at scaring kids was Scared Straight, a program that brought young people into prisons to basically be abused verbally by members of the prison community both guards and inmates. This became a TV show and the program spread around the country like wildfire. Often the inmates got considerations for trying to put fear into the hearts of the young people. The main groups brought in were already petty offenders but there were also attempts to scare students before they got involved with crimes.
So my senior seminar class was about persuasion so I wrote my final paper on the efficacy of these kinds of messages. What I found was the overwhelming evidence that these approaches simply do not work. While they made people feel good the students neither believed the drug program educators nor the inmates when it came to the possible outcomes. In fact, while I was writing the paper the Scared Straight crowd did a follow up show ten years after the first show. What we found was that many of the kids who were in the first programs continued to commit crimes, a few escalated in seriousness and a couple were free of any further criminal activity. (for one though it seemed he was just better at not getting caught). I was stunned, it was like made for my thesis. However, more than 30 years later and many more publications on why this is a bad idea there are still kids being dragged to prisons, pictures of black lungs on cigarette packs and just the other day the President of the United States suggested television and internet commercials targeting young people saying, "The best way to beat the drug crisis is to keep people from getting hooked in the first place," President Trump said. "This has been something I have been strongly in favor of spending a lot of money on great commercials showing how bad it is." he went on to say, "So that kids seeing those commercials during the right shows on television or wherever, the internet, when they see these commercials they (will say), 'I don't want any part of it.' That is the least expensive thing we can do. Where you scare them from ending up like the people in the commercials and we will make them very, very bad commercials. We will make them pretty unsavory situations and you have seen it before and it is had an impact on smoking and cigarettes."
But it didn't work before and it won't work again. And what is a real serious issue is that many opioid addicts are becoming that way because of non-medical use of prescription pain killers. Doctors are very quick to prescribe addictive pain killers as pharmaceutical companies have made them cheaper, easier to take and lucrative for doctors. There are even some doctors that are so free with prescriptions that they become defacto drug dealers for people who once used pain killers for legitimate treatment but became hooked. Street opioids are also more available because there is a clear market for it and heroin is making a major resurgence in the street drug market.
Combating the opioid problem is something that will require a lot of thought, a lot of cooperative work and a real federal, state and local action on the part of law enforcement, public health and the private medical profession. It will take a serious look at the suppliers, (though the President just wants to apply the death penalty to them) but also the foundation of this crisis. We must investigate the genesis of people's addiction, and work to stop the origin and gateway for so many. People are dying, not because they don't know the results of drug use, nor that they are just bad people. It is because the class of drugs in question are tailor made to interact with our nervous system in a way that leads to addiction. It is time we take it seriously and leave the eggs for your local diner.
So my senior seminar class was about persuasion so I wrote my final paper on the efficacy of these kinds of messages. What I found was the overwhelming evidence that these approaches simply do not work. While they made people feel good the students neither believed the drug program educators nor the inmates when it came to the possible outcomes. In fact, while I was writing the paper the Scared Straight crowd did a follow up show ten years after the first show. What we found was that many of the kids who were in the first programs continued to commit crimes, a few escalated in seriousness and a couple were free of any further criminal activity. (for one though it seemed he was just better at not getting caught). I was stunned, it was like made for my thesis. However, more than 30 years later and many more publications on why this is a bad idea there are still kids being dragged to prisons, pictures of black lungs on cigarette packs and just the other day the President of the United States suggested television and internet commercials targeting young people saying, "The best way to beat the drug crisis is to keep people from getting hooked in the first place," President Trump said. "This has been something I have been strongly in favor of spending a lot of money on great commercials showing how bad it is." he went on to say, "So that kids seeing those commercials during the right shows on television or wherever, the internet, when they see these commercials they (will say), 'I don't want any part of it.' That is the least expensive thing we can do. Where you scare them from ending up like the people in the commercials and we will make them very, very bad commercials. We will make them pretty unsavory situations and you have seen it before and it is had an impact on smoking and cigarettes."
But it didn't work before and it won't work again. And what is a real serious issue is that many opioid addicts are becoming that way because of non-medical use of prescription pain killers. Doctors are very quick to prescribe addictive pain killers as pharmaceutical companies have made them cheaper, easier to take and lucrative for doctors. There are even some doctors that are so free with prescriptions that they become defacto drug dealers for people who once used pain killers for legitimate treatment but became hooked. Street opioids are also more available because there is a clear market for it and heroin is making a major resurgence in the street drug market.
Combating the opioid problem is something that will require a lot of thought, a lot of cooperative work and a real federal, state and local action on the part of law enforcement, public health and the private medical profession. It will take a serious look at the suppliers, (though the President just wants to apply the death penalty to them) but also the foundation of this crisis. We must investigate the genesis of people's addiction, and work to stop the origin and gateway for so many. People are dying, not because they don't know the results of drug use, nor that they are just bad people. It is because the class of drugs in question are tailor made to interact with our nervous system in a way that leads to addiction. It is time we take it seriously and leave the eggs for your local diner.
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