When Alison Sharer of the Drug Force Action Alliance was in high school in the late 70s, her health teacher announced that smoking marijuana would cause young men to grow breasts.
So Sharer says she and her classmates did what any kids would do. First, they closely examined the profiles of every boy they knew smoked pot. Second, they wondered if marijuana would also help young women develop a little faster.
When they realized that boys weren’t sprouting breasts (and that marijuana wouldn’t help the girls grow their own), Sharer and her classmates lost all faith in the health teacher’s credibility – especially when it came to warnings about drug use.
“But the thing is, there was a grain of truth there. Some young men, if they smoke marijuana at certain key points in puberty, can grow breasts – but it’s not some rampant case of cause and effect,” Sharer says, noting a little-known condition called gynecomastia. “That grain of truth was blown out of proportion and said so extremely that it lost all impact.”
Sharer told the story at the Nittany Lion Inn on Thursday to a room of substance abuse prevention specialists from all across Pennsylvania during a lecture about why “scare tactics in prevention don’t work.”
Penn State brings prevention specialists from Pennsylvania and beyond to campus each year for the “Leading the Challenge” substance abuse prevention annual conference. Thursday was the second of three days of the conference, which featured several workshops and lectures.
Sharing her experience at one point during Thursday’s talk on scare tactics, one prevention specialist said she feels that fear doesn’t have any long-term impact when used to deter drunk driving. In her experience, most kids seem to forget the point of DUI crash simulations by the next day.
Another specialist said that whenever family members share personal stories of losing loved ones to drunk driving accidents or drug overdoses, it seems like kids miss the point entirely. They may feel bad for the family, but they’re not any less likely to use mind-altering substances.
Sharer says these anecdotes reveal important truth about using scare tactics to keep kids off drugs.
Because of where teens are in their biological development, they experience “hormonal waves” that can cause intense emotional reactions. So even if a DUI simulator or some horror story about drug use gives them a scare, that doesn’t mean that feeling will carry over to “the moment of choice.”
If they’re at a party where someone they admire or really like offers them drugs and alcohol, are they going to remember the fear they felt at some anti-drug school assembly? And even if they do, will that memory of fear be more powerful than the emotions they’re feeling in that moment?
“With scare tactics, all we’re doing is arousing fear, dropping the mic and walking offstage, hoping that fear will be enough to save the day,” Sharer says.
So what’s a prevention professional to do?
Unfortunately, Sharer says, it’s not as easy as just replacing scare tactics with another approach and congratulating each other. Drug use has deep psychological and societal roots, and prevention is more than just education.
But the good news is that people are paying attention to the issue, giving counselors a window to effect real change and save lives.
“This is a public health issue, and it deserves a public health response,” Sharer says.
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