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Comment by explorer83 | Hacker News Reader

The short term effects of many drugs seem harmless. Because they seem harmless, it makes the anti-drug messaging seem overblown. It's usually too late once the long term effects are noticed. I wish there was a better way to get that message through other than experience.

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Moderation is key. But there’s a scale to moderation that has to be learned as well.

>I wish there was a better way to get that message through other than experience.

There is, puritanical American culture just wont do it. Abstinence only education, whether for sex or drug consumption doesn't work.

It's completely viable to talk to kids about risk factors for different drugs. When I was growing up they acted like marijuana and heroin were the same risk factors.

'Drugs are fun until they aren't' is something kids can understand. We should also talk about how people are different and some people can do recreational drugs and never have a problem and others can do the same amounts of drugs at first and develop an addiction.

Except abstinence education is shown to delay sexual activity [0] (and possibly drug activity). Normalizing potentially dangerous behavior under the assumption that it can be safer is not a replacement for saying you probably shouldn’t do it until you’re able to understand and handle the consequences.

0 - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

Basing anything on one social experiment is not wise.

“The weight of scientific evidence shows these programs do not help young people delay initiation of sexual intercourse,” says co-author John Santelli, professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School. “While abstinence is theoretically effective, in actual practice, intentions to abstain from sexual activity often fail. These programs simply do not prepare young people to avoid unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases.” [0][1]

Further, abstinence only sex education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy rates

"After accounting for other factors, the national data show that the incidence of teenage pregnancies and births remain positively correlated with the degree of abstinence education across states: The more strongly abstinence is emphasized in state laws and policies, the higher the average teenage pregnancy and birth rate. "[2]

Informing youth about the realistic outcomes of actions, whether its sex or taking drugs, is going to be a lot more effective than just telling them not to do it.

[0]https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/abstinence-only-e... [1]https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(17)30297-5/full... [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/

> Abstinence only education, whether for sex or drug consumption doesn't work.

This line gets repeated a lot, with the implied assumption that since X doesn't work the solution must be to invert X.

That's incorrect.

You know how you dramatically reduce teen pregnancy? You increase their socio-economic status.

The fix to drug use is not to teach kids the best way to shoot heroin or how to drug test for fentanyl, anymore than the fix for teen pregnancy is practicing putting condoms on bananas.

Except "putting condoms on bananas", which is a hilariously bad faith description of sex ed, has demonstrably reduced teen pregnancy.

That was my non-abstinence sex ed experience as a University freshman. I mean there was a certain amount of reading and the usual dumb multiple choice quizzes too, but it was not a medical course.

(We actually had a wooden practice phallus, but the banana line was funnier.)

Your only sex ed was in University? That's unusual. We didn't have sex ed in university, we had "health class" all throughout middle and part of high school. It covered lots more than birth control methods too, like what signs there are you are in an emotionally abusive relationship.

>That's incorrect.

You're welcome to find some sources that support your assertion. All the research on the matter disagrees with you though.

Which ones do you think this applies to? Long term effects

Ironically, the two main legal drugs (excluding caffeine) - tobacco and alcohol - have some of the worst long term effects. Others can have long term effects though, like MDMA is somewhat neurotoxic but not to a degree that matters with infrequent acute use, but it becomes very relevant if someone were to use it regularly.

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