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.