Yeah I was thinking the same thing. It’s close enough for the target audience. Doesn’t go the any extreme.
Comment on The way my daughter's middle school health class classifies drugs is insane.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
What specifically stands out to you as a ridiculous bit of probaganda?
It’s certainly not the most accurate or clinical, and some of the categories are a bit “eh”, but nothing popped out to me that I would describe so strongly.
If nothing else, it’s a lot more objective and grounded in reality than what they gave me in that dumb dare program. Might be why my reaction is just “close enough”.
Freestylesno@lemmy.world 1 month ago
undercrust@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Most of the information in the hallucinogenic section is incorrect.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Hrm, I always thought it was just a mis-name for PTSD after an excessive dose.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep…
It looks like there’s at least a degree of clinical validation to it being a combo of PTSD and “sometimes colors stay funny for a while”.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of “the entire war on drugs, but particularly pot and heroin”?
That’s what I thought was an invention by the Nixon administration.undercrust@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Oh, HPPD is definitely a thing, but extraordinarily rare.
I may have misspoke about the brown acid - this was a legit warning resulting from “home-brew chemists” attempting to make their own LSD and failing to create it properly. Most of the supplies back then were direct from Sandoz (Novartis) and basically were being given away to the scientific community for novel testing. Fun stuff.
I’m talking about the hyperbole of “acid flashbacks” which was a narrative introduced to discourage and demonize LSD usage by the political and intellectual opponents of the Nixon administration. “Rots your brain permanently” and all that other garbage.
Turns out regular LSD usage by the “hippie” community and by many people involved in high-level education (particularly college and university professors) was making people feel more connected and empathetic towards one another, and that just didn’t do for the Republicans who needed everyone to fear “the other”.
What they also did with marijuana and heroin, and subsequently with crack cocaine, was truly abhorrent.
ParabolicMotion@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I agree, but I don’t think D.A.R.E. was dumb. It was just difficult to hear the personal opinions that officers had of people who had been on particular drugs that are so often used in a hospital setting. Between the time I was an infant to the time I was ten, I had already been hospitalized for various illnesses and injuries that sometimes required hospital grade medications. Try telling a third grade kid that she is a bad person because the hospital put her on intravenous pain medication after having both her radius and ulna completely broken in a fall from the school’s playground equipment.
On a side note, after so many hospitalizations in my life, I absolutely hate people who use drugs for fun.
MutilationWave@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Mind your own business and you’ll have a happier life, less hateful.
ParabolicMotion@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s everyone’s business when some recreational drug user makes bad choices that impact the lives of others.
bane_killgrind@kbin.social 1 month ago
Nah it was everyone's business before that. People "drink responsibly". They can and do imbibe other drugs responsibly.
Dasus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And it’s everyone’s business that people like you make drug reform impossible, because all the science agrees that the only way to solve “the drug problem” is to legalise and regulate everything.
You’re suffering from the same bias that transphobes who say “I can always spot trans people” do; you’re simply unaware of how blindingly ignorant you are of the reality of the situation.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Wait, so you think dare wasn’t dumb, but you have specific negative memories associated with it mischarecterizing drug users due to your legitimate usage?
I would call a program that makes children feel bad for going to the doctor “dumb”.Your dislike of people who use drugs because you went to the hospital a lot is quite strange. I’m not sure why those would be related.
Did they put you in the hospital, or make a police officer come to your school and tell you you were a bad person?ParabolicMotion@lemmy.world 1 month ago
D.A.R.E. never hurt me. Sorry it seems like the program did something abusive to you personally. You could always file a police report about it, if it was that bad. It’s not like the officers who led it were abusive drug users in our lives, sent to the classroom to beat us with belts, or closed fists. If your biggest gripe from childhood is a bunch of drug abuse resistance education officers, lecturing you for less than one hour, then you had a pretty privileged childhood.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
You’re making a lot of leaps there from me calling it “dumb”.
You’ll have to forgive me for thinking it made you uncomfortable, considering that’s what you said.
And none of that even touches where you get the connection between “I was in the hospital” and “I hate drug users”.
Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Given your experience and the way they made you feel from the practitioners’ sheer ignorant and biased approach I would have thought you’d definitely be the first to call the program “dumb” as the very least of the criticisms to be levelled at it.
ParabolicMotion@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I don’t think it was dumb to educate children about the dangers of drug abuse. What I think is dumb, is the new program they have created to replace D.A.R.E. That program has representatives that stand outside of stores, pestering shoppers for donations, and when the shoppers decline, the representatives say things like, “guess you choose drugs!” while fake coughing to mask their remarks. That’s immature and unprofessional. D.A.R.E. was more professional.
Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I think my surprise here is that given the program’s reputation, and your experience with it, it seems there was quite some gulf between theoretical intent and practice. Educating children about drugs, probably seems relatively uncontroversial to most, I think you could get a lot of people with otherwise pretty different views on drugs to get behind the idea. The way the D.A.R.E. program went about it and the content of the program and the accuracy of the education they attempted to deliver seem from a distance to have been very questionable. This is why it’s so perplexing to me why you hold such a surprising level of respect for D.A.R.E., I mean sure the intent could have been education, but it doesn’t sound very much like the intent and the reality had a lot of overlap. I’m careful with my wording here because where I grew up we didn’t have ‘D.A.R.E.’ specifically so I can only form judgment based on what one hears and reads about the program.
ShepherdPie@midwest.social 1 month ago
I agree too. Just the classifications alone seem close enough, and GHB is absolutely a ‘club’ drug that also happens to be a date rape drug. Back in my heyday, I knew several people that would use it recreationally when we’d go out to an EDM show (or in the hours after we got back to the crash pad to keep the party going).
I didn’t read the whole thing, so I can comment on specific content like ‘weed being a gateway’ drug, but that’s been disproven time and time again and this type of propaganda is common from schools and the government as they’re bound by archaic laws to portray drugs in such a way.
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
GHB is so fun.
ShepherdPie@midwest.social 1 month ago
I honestly never tried it simply because the connotations with it being the “date rape” drug (and also because I was already enjoying myself with other stuff).
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Fair! It’s kinda like being a little drunk, but also REALLY horny for food (it makes food better than even weed does), and also reeeeally enhances sexual stuff. My partner and I would take it and get weeeeird.
If you’re active, you can stay active forever. GHBike Rides are fantastic.
If you’re laying around, you WILL fall asleep. Your brain will crave sleep more than a junkie craves heroin (fent now, I guess.)
LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 month ago
Marijuana being a gateway drug.
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Also being the most abused drug. I’d say that would be caffeine. There are more people who take caffeine daily than cannabis. But this seems to be about “bad” drugs, not “good” drugs.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I’d give it to alcohol, not caffeine personally. I wouldn’t say most people “abuse” caffeine, they just drink it.
Abuse to me implies having a negative impact, and I can think of more people who have been negatively impacted by weed than by caffeine, but way more from alcohol than either, and with a significantly more negative impact.
I know people who smoke too much and it’s definitely made them stagnate in life and gain a lot of weight.
I know people who drink way too much caffeine and get insomnia, leading to a cycle of discomfort and heartburn from all the coffee.
I know people who drank too much alcohol and died, or developed terrible health complications.
Most people are totally fine with all of them, but alcohol is easily the worst and most common.
warlaan@lemm.ee 1 month ago
It doesn’t say that I’m the text. It literally says that it is CALLED a gateway drug because of what SOME people do.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Yup, that’s a good one. Gateway drug notion is generally iffy at the absolute most generous.
This one wasn’t as “smoking the weed will make you do heroin and die” as others, just “some people do other things after doing this one”, but it’s still not super worth mentioning.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 month ago
What are you supposed to do? Start with meth?
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Yeah, that’s the thought. That or ecstacy or something.
In reality, it’s mostly that it’s so common that everyone who might do “hard drugs” would have been exposed to pot as just background noise, like alcohol or chocolate ice cream.
It only gets a shade of credence because there have been studies indicating that some people start with pill based drugs and then just leave it at that with a “hard drug” incidence rate lower than someone who smoked pot.
The sample sizes are so small that the only real conclusion someone can draw is that it’s not definitely false and it needs more study. But it’s not that important, so funding is slow and unlikely.
sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
That was the only thing that popped out to me.
Jarix@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I mean that’s been a “thing” since at least the late 80s. Not that i think its accurate but its all too common an opinion you will find that isnt completely batshit crazy.
sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
DARE came to my HS in the mid-late 80s. A cop was standing at a table with various things on it. One of which was a big bag of weed. I said,“Damn! That’s a big bag of weed!” The cop replied, totally seriously,“THAT’S ENOUGH WEED TO KILL YOU!!!” My friends and I just laughed and walked away.