The United States Federal Government - 1219 Words

How about maybe? In this paper I will outline the problems of the pedagogical approach the United States federal government took in light of the War on Drugs on the wide public education on drug use. I will examine two different articles from Think Progress and The Guardian that argue against the 1986 initiative by Nancy Reagan that became one of the most subtle but destructive aspects about the War on Drugs. She started an country wide program aimed at educating the youth. More specifically on being able to prevent drug use in teenagers. However, there were unintended consequences that I believe negatively affected the minds bodies and futures of those same teenagers they were trying to help out. Also, the seemingly noble intent to†¦show more content†¦For instance, shortly after its initiation, police officers started being brought into public schools. The usual events were comprised of drug prevention talks where the police demonize drug dealers and shared their experien ces dealing with drugged out people. While these scare tactics give an appearance of deterrence there was a study cited in the article by Scientific American, conducted that teenagers were just as likely to use drugs after through these abstinence based programs than if they didn’t get any information at all. The article also found a fatal flaw in the DARE campaigns pedagogy, it was the lack of student in student role play on how to handle social situations with drugs. Bringing in the longitudinal study from a reputable source reinforces the argument against the DARE programs pedagogy. Not only did they show that has the Nancy Reagan philosophy been ineffective, the article subtly made a point to highlight how wasteful it must have been to use our tax money to fund ineffective police educational programs. While no statistics were shown, the fact that these programs were found to be highly ineffective gives this argument quite a bit of merit. Parallel to this, in 1986 congres s passed the Drug Free Schools and Communities Act which mandated a zero tolerance policy to drugs in schools. This was the first time police officers began arresting students straight out of schools. This fact also shines light on the how destructive a simple minded