But by then he had already lost interest and wandered into the kitchen in search of breakfast.
It feels a little uncomfortable to be keeping this experiment a secret from my kids. From the very first time our kids asked about drugs, while listening to the radio (“Dad, when he says he gets ‘high with a little help from his friends,’ he doesn’t mean high like on drugs, does he?”), my husband and I have tried to be forthright. (“Yes, he means high on drugs.”) We talk about which drugs have a high potential for abuse and injury, and how to avoid those perils, and we also talk about which drugs are relatively safer. We try to be very clear about the risks and rewards of drug use.
All of this frank talk inevitably invites questions about our own drug use. My husband and I have always operated on the principle that, though we don’t owe our children an answer to every one of their questions, when we do choose to say something, we owe them the truth. If the kids ask us if we’ve done a certain drug and we don’t feel that they’re old enough to understand the answer or even if we just prefer not to say, we’ll tell them that. Otherwise, we grit our teeth and fess up. We never lie.
I’m surprised, frankly, that so many parents do. Or perhaps it’s not lying. Perhaps it’s collective amnesia. A number of years ago, we were dropping off our kids at sleep-away camp and bumped into an old college friend of mine. His son is older than my kids, and was already applying to college. I asked if his son was looking at Wesleyan, our alma mater. God forbid, my old friend told me. The school has such an intense drug culture!
I laughed. It was so clearly a joke. Wesleyan might be notorious for it, but all schools have drug cultures, including the Ivy League institution his child ended up attending. I know of at least one person whose child came home from Harvard with a heroin addiction. True, my old college friend was particularly sensitive because he was in law enforcement, but hadn’t the two of us been at the same parties? I was not much of a drug user, so my mind was not so addled that I forgot who was there. (Hint: he was there!) As I recall, he imbibed a lot more freely than I did. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t remember.
That was hardly the first moment of parental hypocrisy or convenient amnesia around drugs I have encountered. Many Gen X and Y parents, no matter how little their joint-rolling expertise harmed their careers and personal prospects, are racked with anxiety when it comes to their children and drugs. How many parent meetings have I sat through, listening to earnest educators explain how we can best help our children stand up to “peer pressure”? As if all our children are weak-willed moral midgets, unable to resist the drug-pushing Svengalis of the eighth grade. Every once in a while, someone will have the temerity to wonder if a few kids might be smoking pot not because they’re bullied into submission, but because they think it’s fun. That person will usually be roundly shouted down. That person is usually my husband or me.
Because we believe that the refusal to be honest will eventually hurt our children, my husband and I have adopted a harm-reduction strategy when it comes to issues like drug use. Harm reduction is defined as a set of practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences.*2 The basic tenets of harm reduction when it comes to drugs are that drug use is a fact of contemporary life, that drugs can be dangerous, and that it is possible to minimize the harm. Harm reduction is not incompatible with disapproving of drug use, but it is incompatible with denying that drug use exists.*3
The truth about drug use is so much more complicated than we want to believe. It’s certainly more complicated than our drug education programs allow. Take, for example, Project D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), the most popular drug education program. For twenty-five years, D.A.R.E. persisted in miseducating children that all drugs, from marijuana to methamphetamine, were similarly dangerous; all drugs would destroy their brains and lives. Numerous reputable studies proved that the “facts” D.A.R.E. was pushing were both inaccurate and ineffective. Research showed that children who participated in D.A.R.E. programs actually experimented with drugs at higher rates. This makes sense. A seven-year-old hears that the demon weed will sizzle his brain and thinks, I’ll never do drugs! A cynical fourteen-year-old hears the same message, notices that her cousin the pothead just graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and dismisses not just the misinformation about marijuana, but everything else the D.A.R.E. program has to offer. It was only in 2009, with its funding sources at risk, that D.A.R.E. finally adopted a science-based approach, focusing on honesty, safety, and responsibility.
Recognizing the context in which teenagers live is critical to helping them make good choices. And the context in which our children live is one in which drugs are a constant presence. According to a 2014 study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), more than half of high school seniors report having tried illegal drugs.*4 And these are self-reports! The figure might even be larger, because people tend, if anything, to under-report illegal activity.*5 Forty percent admit to having used an illegal drug in the previous year, and 25 percent in the previous month. The rates of alcohol use are even more striking. Fully 68 percent of seniors say they have tried alcohol. Given these numbers, a parental policy exclusively focused on abstinence is not only deluded but dangerous.
Most people are familiar with Mothers Against Drunk Driving’s “Contract for Life,” in which the child agrees not to drive drunk but to call for a ride, and the parent agrees to provide the ride without judgment or consequence. This is a classic harm-reduction model. None of us wants our children to abuse alcohol or drugs, but even less do we want them to fear our wrath so much that they take a ride that ends up killing them. Studies show that the flexibility in thinking that allows your teens to learn is what also causes them to be more likely to engage in an unknown risk (drunk driving, possibly dying) than a known risk (being yelled at by Mom). It’s as though the very thing that makes them smarter must first make them stupid. My husband and I feel that the best way to combat this stupidity is with information.