I’ve spend many holidays alone at this point. Even last Christmas.
For New Years I usually try to get to the city, and walk around for a couple of hours enjoying the chaos around. You might bump into some random people, which could lead to who knows what?
I asked my cousins who are in high school. They don’t seem to be fed as much moral panic bullshit as I was. People who smoke marijuana aren’t doomed to hell, drug users aren’t all “worthless” welfare drags. It goes hand in hand with the improved education they are getting on mental health and addiction.
The main scare push sounds to be around drugs of unknown provenance. Like, don’t take unknown pills offered to you at a party where you can be whisked away by a stranger once you drop unconscious. Or die a painful death due to dirty drugs cut with who knows what.
Their school has Narcan doses in the med station.
Our town used to have a needle program but current leadership tipped back more conservative and they got rid of those types of programs. My cousins think that’s bullshit; they are well aware of the low efficacy of abstinence-only programs.
I asked them if they knew about the old D.A.R.E. program of the 80s and 90s. One had a decent idea of what it was, the other thought it was a meme; she had only ever seen ~millenial-aged casual drug users wear D.A.R.E T-shirts so she thought the whole thing was meant to be ironic.
For context, I grew up in the Midwest, middle school and high school from the late 90s into the early 00s. The referenced cousins and I live in New England now.
graduated not too long ago, it was basically pure misinformation. the typical one touch will murder you, it’ll ruin your life, with a dash of shaming people who have addictions.
Yeah, this is not the best question because you’ll get very different answers from different parts of the world, or even different parts of the US.
I graduated more than a decade ago, and there was a lot more nuance than what you described. They taught us about different types of drugs and what their real effects were. I remember learning in high school that marijuana is less dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol.
In elementary school for me, there were big anti-smoking campaigns, but nothing about alcohol or harder drugs. The “just say no” was about peer pressure and doing anything you felt uncomfortable doing (including inappropriate touching).
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