As I have critiqued many other classes in the past, today I’ll focus on health class. However, my health class critique will mostly just focus on the topic of drug use. Many of our nations junior high and high school health teachers tell our youths to not use drugs, and while I find it ethically dubious that government schools try to sway impressionable minds away from bodily autonomy, most of society thinks this is a valuable tenet to preach. Thus, rather than fight reality, I’ll provide some better teaching methods to drive that message home.
Currently, the teacher typically focuses on the negative long-term consequences of drug use, especially to one’s health. However, this messaging is incomplete and adolescents and teenagers aren’t known for their long-term reasoning skills. Besides, in our modern culture, films such as Scarface and more current-day musicians such as Snoop Dogg, Wiz Khalifa and countless others have glorified drug use. Our Educational Industrial Complex has been slow to realize that you simply cannot fight propaganda with facts; propaganda needs to be fought with more propaganda.
This is where our modern love of radicalization can swoop in and save the day. Instead of having the don’t use drugs talk in health class, we can simply move it to social studies class for students. Lessons can revolve around the profiles of who benefits when drugs are sold in America. For example, it’s no secret that fentanyl is everywhere in the United States now, and that the Chinese Communist Party is behind it. To drive the knife in further, teachers can start pouring over the atrocities of the modern Chinese Communist Party. We as a society need to start promoting the fact (and yes, it is a fact) that China is not an ally of the United States and is instead our chief adversary. Using fentanyl is essentially giving money to America’s enemies which is literal treason.
“But Dan, most American dope-heads don’t know that they are taking fentanyl, so that isn’t fair to call fentanyl users CCP sympathizers!” a Chinese apologist will say. First, the money winds up in Xi Jinping’s pocket regardless, so fairness doesn’t enter the picture. However, I’ll play ball with you on your grander point anyways and focus on a drug that users knowingly take. Cocaine is a drug that receives a lot of cultural limelight, and we can blame the heavy-handed 80’s nostalgia for that. However, we can flip the script, and talk about modern-day cocaine trafficking cartels. We can show the carnage-yes, bullet holes, dead bodies, decapitations, and all-left behind by these heinous organizations. Buying cocaine provides funding for these shitstains (ah, I can’t wait for the AI bot to give me a stern finger-wag on that one!). “But Dan, that might traumatize our precious children! We can’t do that in America” is a complaint that some Karen will lob at me for that idea. Bullshit. Public schools have been strategically using trauma as an educational tool for decades now; health class has been using the healthy lung vs smoker’s lung to gross out children since the 90’s, so this is a tactic that society clearly is okay with.
Heroin will not be let off the hook either in this new curriculum. Opium, the key raw material for heroin, is grown in Southern Asia and the Middle East. Afghanistan used to be the world’s leading producer of the plant, though it has since been passed by Myanmar. Myanmar is an autocratic regime that consistently ranks as one of the worst in the world regarding its human rights track record. Thus, heroin users are actively paying to uphold a system that kills, tortures and wrongfully imprisons journalists and protestors. Showing the squalid living conditions of the prisons that house Myanmar dissidents while laying on an extra-thick layer of guilt should do the trick.
However, if we insist that drug use needs to be taught in health class and not social studies, then I propose that we take a different angle. We need to teach grade 6-12 students that the United States doesn’t have socialized health care. This will be a focal point of the curriculum. Colombian Nose Candy is known to cause heart problems, and a heart attack will cost more than your parent’s house. Want to shoot up? Odds are you’ll eventually catch Hepatitis B from dirty needles and a 30-day supply of your Hep B medication can quickly outpace housing prices, oh yeah, without that medicine you’ll fucking die. Working out the math of how their lives will be permanently financially ruined by an overdose is a great way to scare high school juniors and seniors out of touching drugs.
The strategic use of trauma can be used yet again to drive home an anti-drug message. This time, grade 6-12 students can be taken on field trips to the local prison, so they can see firsthand where drug use will wind up here in America. Drugs are the number one reason why we lock people up in America, and it’s more than double of the second-place contender. Thus, there will be plenty of inmates for the students to talk to about chronic drug use. Driving home this data in class is one thing, but to see the utterly destroyed lives first-hand is another thing entirely. If field trips to prisons is unpalatable for the local PTA conference Karen, then bringing in chronically unemployed ex-cons to talk to the class is a vital part of the curriculum. This is because felons have a 60% unemployment rate in America. Be sure to drive home the no job equals no health insurance point, because no health insurance equals permanent financial ruin or imminent death if one incurs one of the serious overdose-related health issues discussed in the previous paragraph.
“Well Dan, not every dopehead winds up having a heart attack, Hep B, or in prison. Some manage to escape these consequences and genuinely decide on their own that they want to get clean. What do you say to that?” is a critique I’ll inevitably get. State and federally funded rehab programs are scarce, and have lengthy waiting lists. This leads to roughly only 10% of these rehab hopefuls getting the help they actually need. Health class and social studies teachers can drive this point home for extra effect: if you want help, there is a 90% chance that you’ll be left out on your own. Students need to know that they cannot just assume that they’ll get the help that they need, that is unrealistic given the world that we live in. America isn’t The Land of Second Chances. Also, there is a for-profit Rehab Industrial Complex that has bloomed in recent years, and just like the Hep B medicine and emergency treatment for an overdose, you can’t afford it. Have I mentioned that most addicts lack health insurance?
Don’t do drugs kids; you can’t afford it…
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