Bit of a tangential rant: meth is actually truly really bad, and I wish our drug education growing up hadn’t painted this nebulous concept of “drugs”, because there’s gradations of harm.

I’m approaching 40. (Ugh, I hate to admit that.) I grew up during the D.A.R.E. era. Just Say No. Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. “Drugs” were this boogeyman, and whatever they were, they would turn you into a junkie instantly.

I have no idea how you’d study this, as I think this was a pretty much cross-cultural message, but I wonder what would have happened if we could have educated teenagers that, well, “we know you’re going to do drugs, they all have side effects, but some are not that bad, and some will absolutely ruin you.”

Because: I have done a lot drugs in my 30s. Pretty much the full club drug buffet, with the exception of meth and opiates. (Also never smoked a cigarette yet.) And you know what? There are varying degrees of bad. There’s this jaded sense that you build up, that you’re a bit bitter that you wasted quite a lot of your childhood education in D.A.R.E. I wonder if we could have possibly successfully pulled off harm reduction education in drugs, and given people a better set of mental tools to understand what drugs are truly bad, namely meth and opiates, and which drugs are quite honestly far less deleterious than vodka. (You cannot tell me, with a straight face, that weed is physically and socially more harmful than drinking.)