Lessons I Learned from D.A.R.E.

D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) Works

Lots of press lately about police officers establishing a relationship with local communities besides their primary job of enforcing the law. Well, there were some really great lessons I learned from police departments who invested time in my classroom, and I never realized just how much it positively impacted my life, because I had no reason to. But, now having worked with some struggling and recovering addicts, I felt God tugging on my heart to write about why D.A.R.E.’s lessons, just as they were presented in the 90’s, are more relevant than ever.

With all the fluff stories local emergencies are using these days to try to make good optics, I thought I’d take this opportunity to reinforce and affirm one police effort that isn’t just saving a cat from a tree, or a rat from a sewer (yay, rats) but which actually can make a lifelong difference. Only you’d never know it because – well – the druggies simply don’t exist. Not because we shipped them off to Mars, but because they never became druggies in the first place.

Police Community Involvement Isn’t New

But police have really been doing this forever. I remember very distinctly the lessons learned from a local police officer who came to my elementary school to speak and show a short video produced by the D.A.R.E. organization. Go back about a hundred years, and policemen served as crossing guards, even in the hub of the universe. You knew them; and they knew you. Not in my lifetime, granted. But this is what older, wiser people tell me.

Those Who Didn’t Have D.A.R.E.

During my recent work with the Salvation Army, I met a number of people whose lives were simply destroyed by drugs. Unfortunately, the Salvation Army, like most of America, has given into the pressure to almost entirely divorce Christ from its operations, so right now, it’s essentially a social justice operation lacking the Wisdom of Christ which is not altogether different from competing organizations like GoodWill, which have also gone by the wayside, having begun like most churches do, with a clear mission, but having drifted so far out to sea it’s only a matter of time before they sink into the water.

The reason I bring up my work with the Salvation Army is that it was really my first real encounter with people who lacked the wisdom of D.A.R.E. And it made me wonder – how would my life be different today if it hadn’t been for D.A.R.E.? What, thankfully, those of us who never touched drugs often don’t understand, is that drug use is not just devastating; it destroys a person. It destroys a person.

Drugs Destroy Lives

One thing that was made clear to me, particularly from managers I had who, despite having overcome some of the worst side-effects of an addicted life, continued to lash out from time to time. The cold and bitter fact is, as expressed to me by a client of the Salvation Army, there is no cure for a drug-addicted life. There is no 12-step program that can undo the effects of drugs on your life. Don’t get me wrong, these programs are an essential charity to the American economy. But, I would compare it to a woman’s first sexual experience. You simply can’t un-ring a bell.

The great Zig Ziglar said that he was told a person’s first experience injecting heroin produces unparalleled joy – but the price for that joy is life, for the simple reason that no matter how much heroin is consumed after that particular point in time, the high produced by the first hit cannot, will never be repeated. And a heroin addict has to live with this for life – even if they go cold turkey.

As one of our clients at the Salvation Army said, “It’s a lifelong struggle. You must always remain vigilant” lest you fall back into that drug use again.

Let me be very clear. My purpose here isn’t to gloat. My heart is simply broken for the people I worked to serve during my time at the Salvation Army and the clients there.

Leftists Block Good Anti-Drug Education

But I want to be very clear about something else. Leftist politicians are the true ones tanking America. They’ve been doing what leftists always do, and that is simply this: they’ve been successfully lobbying to loosen, rather then strengthen laws pertaining to illegal drug use. This is a huge mistake.

Leftists don’t like the D.A.R.E. program, for the simple reason that it teaches a very important lesson that they don’t want to reckon with, and that is that marijuana is a gateway drug to all other drugs. To take this religious (I’m sorry for you secular people, but I’m going to veer into Christianese for the rest of this paragraph). Satan never tempts someone all the way. It’s a slippery slope to the bottom, and Satan just desires to get you on that slope, until it’s too late, and suddenly you find yourself unable to cling to anything and on your way toward a sure and steady fall. In this regard, drug use is no different from adultery or homosexuality. We have consciences, and those consciences don’t give into evil all at once; so the drug dealer is more than happy to give you a “free” sample. Except, of course, it’s not really free. That sample will cost you the rest of your life. This is one of the hardest parts of the recovering addict’s education. “Always remain vigilant.” Which, really, is excellent advice for all of us. If Americans would simply be wise enough to learn from the mistakes of others. And yet, the left in America seems to be largely successful in its campaign to create a legal drug industry in America, throwing up their hands. Kind of like churches are doing with homosexuality. It’s a defeatist attitude, and it’s poisonous. It’s poisonous as crack cocaine, or heroine, or – marijuana.

Just When You Think It’s Over…

Perhaps you’re thinking – well, perhaps I’ll go through the Salvation Army’s 12-step program, or Teen Challenge. I have a friend who has been through Teen Challenge. She likes to share her story now, and she was recently accepted into Teen Challenge’s program to help others avoid the mistakes she has made.

I worked with a friend in Christian radio who seemed like the most normal person in the entire world. She’s an on-air personality – and basically, show-business people of any sort are suspect to me. But if you looked at her, she was essentially a very self-sufficient person. She performed many administrative tasks at the radio station; my boss loved her – much more than he loved me, may I add. She was earning a degree while doing on-air and production and administrative work at the Christian station – and people who called into the radio station routinely hit on her. I’m not kidding. She’s still a lovely person overall.

But then her former life somehow reared its ugly head. I would suggest that – frankly, my boss was kind of an introverted person. That’s an understatement. My boss who worked with this girl expressed his love for his staff by buying new equipment for the radio station. And so you may see here how I’ve developed my very strong views on media theory and technological determinism. I believe that technology, while it can be used to further the Gospel, also warps the gospel 99 percent of the time. Movies, Film, FoxNews, TBN, all of it. And I’ve detailed precisely how technology warps the Gospel because it’s used incorrectly here if you’d like to read more about it. It’s why, essentially, the church is failing. And once Christ gives way in the public schools, once we remove the Ten Commandments, and school prayer, everything else falls. Why not shoot up after school? There’s no God; life is pointless, so let’s live large now for tomorrow we die anyway. Foolishness. But you’d never know that’s foolishness absent Jesus Christ. And if you don’t believe me, you should see some of the clients I worked with at the Salvation Army, or my personal co-worker from the weird, wacky world of this thing called religious media.

Lessons Learned from D.A.R.E.

Enough commentary, I want to close with the important things that D.A.R.E. taught me that – who knows, if I hadn’t heard them, I perhaps might have been another opioid-addicted, heroine-infused, arm-jabbed statistic. The truth is, I don’t know what might have happened, and I don’t want to know. But the main idea here is, though none of us might visit an alternate reality in which D.A.R.E. didn’t exist, I would make an educated guess that it’s because of D.A.R.E. that I didn’t become one of those statistics, and thus can share all this wisdom with you today here on the AmericasMansMan blog.

Here are the lessons I distinctly remember, without any cheating whatsoever, that have remained inexorably stuck in my mind, which have ensured that I did not become a statistic in today’s American drug epidemic. I know Dare played a profound role, because I grew up with people who didn’t have D.A.R.E. and they turned out – well, as one might expect.

Lessons from D.A.R.E.:

• Marijuana is the gateway drug.  This is as true today as it was when I went through D.A.R.E. no doubt, leftist politicians have probably turned up the heat on D.A.R.E. to shelve this critical part of the D.A.R.E. education program, but if you’re wise, you will heed these words. Not only is Marijuana dangerous of its own accord – believe me, I’ve met the stoners who have done it, and they’re not too bright. Not too bright. I’m being polite. Again, remember, you can tell yourself you’re “only going to do pot,” but I’ve never seen it. You’re making a decision to walk out to the edge of the cliff, and it’s a stupid thing to do.
• “Just Say No.” Marijuana, heroine, cigarettes, anything. Doesn’t matter what controlled substance it is, just say no.
• Use “The Broken Record” strategy of response.  You don’t have to be an expert on why drugs are wrong, or have an answer for big drug, big marijuana (really big here in Massachusetts and Colorado), and the hoards of leftist law makers these days making sophisticated social-justice-warrior, illogical emotional appeals to try to get you to take that first hit. Just say no, or whatever negative response to drugs suits you best. And don’t be afraid to say the same thing over and over again. You might think you’re losing a friend, but really, they weren’t your friend to begin with. As a matter of fact, they’ll respect you more for refusing to do drugs.
• Ignore the Cartoon Bunny Rabbits.  You’re probably thinking, “Gee, this is weird.” Let me explain. At the time, one of the biggest threats to teens wasn’t marijuana, because it wasn’t legal yet, but cigarettes. And so the D.A.R.E. officer who taught in my elementary school classroom played a video of a bunch of cartoon animals, really playing upon the “Camel” mascot of Camel cigarettes. The cartoon featured a bunny rabbit trying to get a kid to use drugs. The message: drug pushers will do anything. They’re shameless. Like the FakeNews, their only concern is to profiteer, even if it’s on the backs of others’ misery. I believe in capitalism, but the drug market for controlled substances is one that is truly evil. Socialists can’t tell the difference between an evil and a good business, they think they’re all evil. Well, drug-pushers are evil. Now, the threat is no longer Camel cigarettes, because the D.A.R.E. program and others like it did such a great job of un-suiting the Camel. But today, the media has taken on the role of doing drug-pushers job. This is mainly because so many in Hollywood who produce children’s entertainment are themselves druggies. They think it’s where creativity comes from, and they’re sadly mistaken, because as we all know, Hollywood is failing these days. I mean, have you watched South Park? Anyway, if you watch any of what’s coming out of Hollywood, or Cartoon Network, or today’s Disney, and Netflix the cartoon makers, for lack of intelligence and real creativity like to bring drugs into the story because it’s an easy way to get kids to watch by means of invoking a taboo.
• Drugs are stupid.  Throw rocks at them. Okay, this one is my personal favorite, but it’s true. So… just – duh. As we used to say back then. Duh. Don’t be a loser. They want to make you think you’re the loser if you don’t use – but people who say things like that are the real losers. Take my word for that.

Just Say “No”

It’s really that simple. Don’t start today, and your life won’t be ruined tomorrow. Life will have enough challenges; and there’s no need to consign yourself to the failure heaps of life voluntarily by lighting up. You can come up with all these crazy excuses, like the government-funded morality hacks at NPR (why does NPR still exist?!?!) who say that saying no to drugs is somehow racist, and that we should thus legalize controlled substances. It’s stupid, and the only people who stand to gain from such stupidity are drug pushers. Or that Fox News cupcake who said the other day that she was going to give marijuana to her dog, assuring the audience that it’s a special marijuana that won’t get the dog high. Give me a break.

There’s no such thing as free drugs, there’s no such thing as a free drug hit. I don’t know this from personal experience, however I’ve met the people who do.

Average people learn from their mistakes, but wise people learn from the mistakes of others. Just say “no.” Don’t do it.

For more information about the D.A.R.E. program check out their Web site, DARE.org. The acronym stands for “Drug Abuse Resistance Education.” Like all sin, drugs are something worth expending your energy resisting.

Of course, if you’ve already gambled with your life and are already entrapped in the snares of addiction, Adult and Teen Challenge might be for you. But hopefully you had D.A.R.E. so you don’t need that kind of thing. I can’t recommend the Salvation Army because they’ve drifted too far themselves, and it’s no longer a Christian organization.

You heard it from America’s Man’s Man. Don’t miss one update; subscribe to the latest by getting in touch via the comments below. Don’t do drugs, kids.