A TIME AND PLACE

I been holding on to this piece for a while. Christopher Hutsul describes his own experience with drug use as a DARE graduate growing up in the eighties. Unsurprisingly he concludes: Not all use is intrinsically bad.

He discovered that DARE had lied to him and that it was possible to engage in occasional use without suffering negative lifelong consequences as a result of his youthful experimentation. In fact science would suggest he was benefited by it.

"The policy of the Centre for Addiction and Mental health is that drug use isn't a no-no right across the board," says Dr. David Wolfe, RBC chair in children's mental health at the Centre... "A certain amount of drug experimentation is developmentally normal."

Not only is it normal, it can actually be a good thing. "There's some research that suggests that kids who don't experiment at all have some other social adjustment problems," says Wolfe. "It's one of those cases where too much is a bad thing and too little doesn't mean that you're necessarily healthy either."

Hutsul is only 26 years old but offers remarkably mature insights on responsible, recreational use of consciousness enhancing substances. His closing statement sums it up.

The very fact that the question is on the table tells me that drugs might not be as evil as they once told us. And it's okay to "Just Say Maybe."

This is what DARE should be teaching. Rather than preaching the unattainable 'Just Say No', our children would be better protected by teaching them when to say yes. Warning them is fine, but misinforming them contributes nothing to their safety.