Scare Em' Straight campaigns

Huh.

We got some dudes from the NHS in, and they told us that drugs are bad, why drugs are bad, and all that jazz.

It also kinda helped that the Effects of Drugs and Alcohol were part of the GCSE Biology exam too, so we had to learn it.

Yup: National Curriculum. Hug it, even if you loathe it: for stuff you will learn. And, it does knobble some really daft things being taught in schools. For all its controversy and flaws.

Hmmm... had a thought. It'll soon be the only place to learn stuff like Fire Safety: they've cut the funding and civil service in that area so hard, airing ads on the TV? Not going to happen in future.

edited 22nd May '12 4:49:20 AM by Euodiachloris

Oh, I remember when the Police Service came into school to do a presentation on reckless driving.

...

I am never, never, never, ever going to not wear a seatbelt.

Ever.

<shudders remembering the black lung>

Actual. Human. Lung. Brought into school to show what tar build-up looks like. Who needs pictures when you can show the real thing? For some reason, that scared me more than the fatty heart with its atrophied muscles and swellings in weird places and oozing gunge.

Whoever that smoker (and big-eater) was, leaving their body to science left a lasting impression.

Eh, that stuff never bothered me, so it didn't leave a particularly lasting impression one way or the other. Then again, I was a morbid child, and was more fascinated with it than put off by it.

Ah, yes. The old smoker's lung exhibit. Did y'all get one with a visible tumor on it?

People in my class kept poking the tumor (it had already been sewn back on twice), so the teacher said that if you poked it too much you'd catch cancer. Sad how many people washed their hands hurriedly.

rofl: no. Ours keeled over from what looked like just classic emphasemia with, from the heart that came with, repeated cardiac failure thrown in for kicks. I think some people even put bets as to which won the race. Not looking at you, Sophie.

Those fire advertisements are damn creepy, even though I knew what happened already. In fact, if I didn't already know that could happen, I think it probably would have worked.

A guest poster on Weebls-Stuff shows you how it's done :) (warning: gross)

'Scare 'Em Straight' type ads worked fine with me, possibly a bit too well in fact. I remember seeing an ad about road safety and spending the next year or so refusing to cross the road unless there wasn't a single car in sight.

One thing to consider is that these campaigns can have some nasty side-effects - for instance, it's not unknown for overly graphic rape warning ads to trigger PTSD flashbacks in rape survivors.

Can't say that hurting the people you're trying to protect is exactly working as intended.

edited 1st Jun '12 12:17:18 PM by Iaculus

When I was in elementary school (or maybe it was middle school), I saw a film about what goes on in a crackhouse. It definitely worked on me.

Occasionally seeing actual crackheads (and other drug addicts) might have helped, too.

Any teenagers who think its cool to take drugs should be made to vist a rehab clinic.

Superficially attractive, that idea is. But most kids are not stupid. If they want to know the effects of the drugs they think^ they are taking, they can go to wikipedia and elsewhere and find out how they work on a molecular level, let alone what the psychological effects are.

^yep, "think" they are taking. I have met a cop who told me that in Edinburgh, some kids thought they were buying ecstacy(MDMA)which they then thought they knew what the effects were. It was in fact Ketamine - which was legal at the time. And compared to ecstacy, it is a pitbull tearing your throat out rather than a kitten nibbling on your tootsies. Or so I have been told.

According to my Health Psychology course, those kind of persuasions can only work if it provides an available solution for the recipient to follow so that those kind of consequences depicted for the unhealthy behavior are avoided or reformed. If you just give them something to be afraid of without offering advice for how to alleviate it, then they're less likely to conform to it.

Plus, y'know, inescapable worries stress people out. We get enough of that as it is.

Know this is a little off topic...but dude, WTF? Ketamine is way more expensive here than E. Some dealer either A: got a good source and misused the fuck out of it or B: was in general a retard. However, your analogy holds up....I've heard "Special K" is like getting a power drill in your frontal lobes.

Well, if it was legal at the time, it would have been a lot cheaper to get.

Edit: Better than the Scare Em' Straight campaigns: Actual information on what's been found in MDMA tablets.

edited 5th Jun '12 6:46:51 PM by DrunkGirlfriend

Ketamine was dirt cheap over here back in the Nineties. And it was legal. Fings ain't wat they useta be, as the old song goes.

We had a couple of cops visit the barracks my Territorial Army Regiment were having their weekend camp in and they had a locked suitcase with them with drugs, all the drugs in them and they gave us quite a good lesson in what the effects were, which is where that bit on Ketamine came from.

As the daughter of a cop, I didn't need the scare em straight crap. As Drunk pointed out he was just calm and honest with me about anything I wanted to know.

I noticed that these PS As tend to have a preach to the choir affect. they don't seem to target those who probably need the information the most effectively.