Most young people in First World countries find it difficult to think of death or permanent illness or injury as things that could happen to them or that they could inflict on other people. Also, the relentless, glamorizing depictions of death, jail and even mental hospitals with which the entertainment industry has bombarded the world for decades have done nothing to dull youth appetites for extreme, risk-taking behavior.
If you want to scare people away from drugs, scare them with the in-between lives. Scare them with the halfway houses, the poverty, the sexual assaults. Scare them with tooth decay. Scare them with hepatitis and AIDS, but be specific: This Is Your Body With Hepatitis, This Is Your Body With HIV. Make sure that they know that these illnesses often don't kill people right away, that their futures can be years of living sick among healthy people before dying painful, debilitated deaths. Scare them by showing them babies born addicted and infected.
Scare them with dwindling relationships, with final, bitter endings to friendships and family connections after the surreal years of strain have made you and the people you loved unrecognizable to yourselves and each other.
Scare them with lost opportunities, with the knowledge that their friends who don't happen to be drug addicts will be finishing college, finishing graduate school, getting married, having children, buying houses, having careers, meeting people who also don't have drug habits, who don't flinch at the sight or sound of police cars. Ask them to imagine accidentally meeting an old friend in the future, and answering the casually posed, friendly question "What are you doing" when the honest answer would be anything from "I'm on my way to check in with my probation officer" to "I'm going to the methadone clinic," to just "Nothing."
Show them the humiliating truth. If there's anything that scares a teenager far more than the prospect of death, it's the prospect of embarrassment.
Copyright L. Kochman, July 7, 2015 @ 6:37 p.m.
