I had a downstairs neighbor who was extremely paranoid about smoking weed. His older brother was busted by the cops and slapped with jail time. That really traumatized him.

I wanted him to feel comfortable smoking in my place, so I took out my phone and opened a police scanner app. We listened to the police dispatch chatter over the radio, which was fun in its own right.

Then all of a sudden, there was a drag race going on 2 miles from us! That sounded like a lot of fun. I wish I was close enough to check out my window and see that.

I realized something then. Of course the cops weren't talking about us. Some random 20 year olds smoking weed in an apartment. They aren't gonna say shit like "Hey, those fucking kids are smoking in the privacy of their home, let's go bust 'em." Even though school programs like DARE would make you believe that.

So if you live on your own and the cops make you paranoid, just listen to a police scanner from your phone. It'll help. You'll realize they have much bigger fish to fry.

Here's a fun activity for you college readers.

Buy a breathalyzer off Amazon and get together with your drinking buddies. This is best done if one of your friends is a cop. Have everyone drink 2 beers, then use the breathalyzer to record everyone's BAC. Now do have your cop friend do field sobriety tests on everyone and write down the results. Rinse and repeat until you are 8 beers deep. Ignore the smiley face with X's for eyes on the breathalyzer. That is the anti-fun indicator.

See who did the best, and congratulations! You have now determined the Designated Drunk Driver for your friend group! When you've all been having a good time and you gotta get home, everybody knows who's most likely to fool the cops!

Except you're not. Field sobriety tests aren't what get you convicted of DUI – it's when they use the Datamaster at the station to get a pinpoint read on your BAC. And the way they get that is with a preliminary breath test. Which you aren't beating by acting sober when you're not.

Just because weed's intoxicating effects are hard to measure doesn't mean you should drive while high. In a best case scenario, there would be a legal limit for weed we could enforce with a measurement. But that doesn't exist.

Just so you know, you can be convicted of DUI without a breathalyzer reading. You could refuse to take it altogether and the courts need a way to deal with that. At the end of the day, if a reasonable person (i.e. a juror) would say "Yeah, that guy's fucked up," you'll get a DUI.

Don't get crazy high and drive just like you wouldn't swallow a handful of klonopin and go skydiving.

Now, I'm not a social psychologist or a credentialed educator, but sending in big, white, and dumpy to tell us not to do drugs was a bad move. Presumably because all the fit cops were doing the real work outside and all porky could handle is speeding tickets and people half his size.

Most children my age share this experience and that's why it is mocked. Not because the cops hated drugs, but because they comically lacked credibility.

I remember seeing billboards and TV commericals for a campaign called "Above the Influence". It always depicted some kid saying no to drugs/alcohol at a party and getting pushback for it.

As a kid I thought, "…okay?" I didn't understand until years later that the slogan was a play on "under the influence". And I didn't go to parties in high school, so getting fucked up was an abstract concept to me. One billboard said that dealers sold meth to look like pop rocks and that was so unrelatable to me. Honors kids from white families were clearly not the target of these campaigns.

Another time in middle school, we had an assembly where a man told us of a girl who went to a party, took half a pill of ecstasy, died, and then her friend was convicted of manslaughter. And again, as a kid I'm like "What the fuck?" I had no framework for understanding what drugs felt like or how they functioned. And that message was handcrafted for a school full of Midwestern white kids.

Every drug campaign had a confusing effect on kids who didn't do drugs, all to say "You know what you're doing and should feel bad" to the kids who were. It's the same self-righteousness that young people hate in fundamentalist boomer Christians.

All of these campaigns targeted children's fears. Drugs were pitched as this "fly to close to the sun" issue. It's valuable to know that there are substances that are too addictive (like heroin), but the distinction had no nuance in the anti-drug campaigns of my youth. The grandstanding seems more like a rationalization of our laws than a measured assessment of where drugs go wrong.

Most people in my social class would say its an issue of control and moderation. Just like alcohol. Children are perceptive of the hypocrisy, especially when they learn that Adderall is just government approved meth for the "fucked up" kids.

I don't understand my kids. They don't listen to a word I say!

– Stephen Covey

In general, adults don't like teenagers because they are human bullshit detectors. Teenagers don't have the same strategies as adults when it comes to shaping their feelings and desires. If anything, teenagers are more authentic than adults. And like toddlers, even though they can't articulate it yet, they are aware of what's happening and act in reasonable ways.

So when I saw big, white, and dumpy tell me he was gonna put me in his police cruiser if he caught me with a joint… What am I to think? Is the alternative to doing drugs being a fat fuck who gets his kicks telling children what to do? You can see where this is going…

Directly trying to "solve" drug abuse with force is like trying to "solve" world hunger. The problem is not physical, but logistical.

Drugs are very much a class based issue. And I was lucky enough to be born in a modest working class family with enough foundation in my life that I wasn't consumed by drugs. But not everyone has that luxury.

What drugs inevitably do is change our way of relating to each other, and thus our contributions to society. At some point, drugs become so blended with someone's personality and self-esteem you can't separate the two. This is what we should aim to avoid. Drugs should not be the biggest pillar of someone's identity.

I want our children to grow with a strong sense of character, and a stern warning you could just easily tell to a wall is not the same as leading by example.

From a kid's perspective, the adults in school have been lying about weed. So naturally more adventurous kids try harder and harder shit until they find their "happy balance". Nowadays, if you ask someone my age about drugs, they'll say, "It's easier to tell you what I haven't done" (sidenote: avoid ether at all costs).

Using fear to convince children is obviously not working. Especially once you acknowledge the internet is an aggressive "belief validation" tool where they can be exposed to anything and everything. It would be far more effective to lead by example, demonstrating discipline and self-control in the face of indulgence.

Not once in my entire childhood did I get a chance to talk to a drug addict, or even hear a thoughtful interview with one. Presumably because the educators thought so little of them. If you want children to have a healthy relationship with drugs, find a cogent drug addict that's experienced the best and the worst of it. Then let him talk about the calm before the storm. The storm. And everything after.

The raw truth of how we feel and manage ourselves is too complex, and it is not the government's job to give it to us from a worksheet approved by Congress. Telling kids shock and horror stories about death and prison does not give them much to work with. It just creates an imposition.

If you do drugs, you should feel ashamed.

With love,

The Government

Talk is cheap. Being a good role model is expensive.

There's a reason drugs won the war on drugs.