The Road Out Blog

Caleb is a young teen living in an affluent area of a major California city. Although he is quite young, Caleb, (not his real name), has shown himself to have unusual talent in acting and singing and has starred in plays in middle school, high school and the local community college. He’s even acted in a few television commercials.

I first heard of this young man from his aunt who attended a parent seminar I gave at a high school in another part of town. The aunt told of her increasing worries over drugs and alcohol abuse among the crowd that Caleb was hanging with. She said that although he was talented and quite handsome, his judgment was poor and he had more courage than sense. I tried to reach the family but got no response.

Today, in a fine upscale neighborhood in the high desert area of Southern California, I was speaking to Junior High School students, eighth graders to be exact. After speaking for about 40 minutes on drugs in general and marijuana in particular, I asked if there were any questions.

A dozen hands went up and the first one I called on asked, "What does "X" do to you?"  I noticed that the other hands went down and the place went quite. (For 100 middle-schoolers, quite a trick.)

I have seen for years the various attempts to solve the problems of drug addiction and abuse. I was working in the industry in the eighties when Nancy Reagan raised the mantra, “Just Say No”.

Just say no. Okay. But how long can a kid just say ‘no’ before someone comes up to him and asks, “Why not?”  (Well, there goes that solution. It worked just fine until some thought was required.

Fortunately, we are not robots and a simple, no-responsibility answer to a complex question will never last.

This is a question the kids in schools are asking constantly. Are there any safe drugs? That is like asking, “Are there any safe highways?”

Well, yes, and no. It can never be totally safe to travel at 70 miles per hour in a metal box on wheels and have a hundred other such boxes traveling in various directions nearby. But if you are careful, driving the highway can get you where you need to go much faster and with less exposure to a few idiot drivers elsewhere.

A far as drugs go, lets take a look: 

In what is called “a blueprint to accomplish ambitious goals”, it calls for a reduction in youth drug use by 15%