DARE TO TELL YOUR KIDS THE TRUTH - QUANDARIES OF A THINKING PARENT

I consider a loving, trusting relationship with my children to be one of
the most important aspects of my life. My parents, in their effort to
"protect" me, told me half-truths and mistruths. How betrayed I felt when I
learned that they had not always been honest with me! This was a feeling I
did not want my own children to experience.

I soon learned that if I told the truth and tried to prepare my kids for
their eventual role as responsible adults, my message to them often
conflicted with messages they heard via the media, movie images,
commercials or others with different political or social agendas. These
conflicting messages reached their ears even though they were
home-schooled, and despite the fact we had no commercial television at home.

We struggled with how to protect our children from these lies and partial
truths, without putting them at risk of losing respect for authority. How
could we teach them to question the values that modern consumer society
holds dear, without alienating them from the rest of the community?

Bombarded with psychologically manipulative advertisements, which often
form rather than reflect social values, how could we explain why "needs"
are different from "wants"?

Our public school was a mess, with a lack of discipline, rampant bullying
and name-calling. My own experience with school made me want to be able to
offer other options to our family. I didn't want my kids spending hours
doing "busy work" while their minds yearned to soar. My desire was not to
structure learning into tight time periods, but instead to allow constant
access to their natural curiosity and hunger to explore our universe. As a
home educator I felt I could teach my children truth and reason, with a
strong emphasis on personal responsibility.

A dilemma presented itself when we began to discuss drugs with them. The
confusion I experienced when trying to explain the drug war to my kids
eventually led to a twenty-year involvement in drug education and drug
policy reform.

Learning About Drugs When I was growing up in the forties and fifties,
there wasn't much talk about drugs, but of course they were everywhere,
even then. Some of my earliest memories are the smells of cigarette smoke
and coffee greeting me every morning. I probably owe my life to the
antibiotic medications that I was given as a child, when I suffered
recurrent upper respiratory infections, possibly brought on by the
excessive smoke.

My family did not use alcohol at all, even to discuss it. It was just
considered bad. When I graduated from a small mid-western school in 1962, I
only knew of a couple of people in the whole school who smoked cigarettes
and no one who drank alcohol. That was soon to change as I entered college
in the sixties, with its "party till you puke" motto. It was a weak
stomach, not high morals that kept me out of trouble with alcohol. Even
though I yearned to fit in with the crowd, I didn't like being sick, which
was inevitable if I drank even small amounts.

I watched as my friends and other students tried a plethora of legal and
illegal drugs, even banana peels, in an attempt to get high. Some had
problems many with alcohol. Most encountering problems had them because
they didn't know what drug they were getting, had no idea of dosage or what
to expect. I was astounded at their willingness to risk the unknown, given
my own self-protective instincts which kept me from such experimentation.

It wasn't until the late sixties that I smoked marijuana after observing no
ill health effects on the marijuana users I knew. I was pleasantly
surprised as it relaxed me, but was not nearly as heavy or injurious
feeling as alcohol. At this point I started to question the law. Still I
naively believed there must be a health threat since the laws were so harsh.

During the '70s, I started to see negative effects of drug use on people I
cared about. My grandmother was over-medicated on prescription drugs, a
neighbor suffered cirrhosis of the liver from excessive alcohol use, an
uncle had emphyzema from years of heavy smoking and a friend was dependent
on over-the-counter nasal inhalers.

By 1980 I had my own children who looked to me to teach and protect them.
To prepare them for the decisions they would face regarding these legal
drugs I sought to better educate myself on the subject. I needed good
information and found it at the University of Oregon, Drug Information
Center (UODIC), directed by Mark Miller. Working with the academic staff of
the UODIC and nationally ranked UO Health Education Dept., Mr. Miller
developed the nationally acclaimed Drug Consumer Safety Education (DCSE)
curriculum and presentations.

The unbiased health approach of the DCSE recognized that our society's
virtually exclusive focus on illegal drugs has obscured a terribly
important fact: that negative side affects (drug interactions and allergic
reactions) are far more likely to be experienced by people improperly using
the many legal, readily available drugs than people using illegal drugs.
The general lack of awareness about problems of tolerance and dependence in
regard to legal drugs makes it hard for people to participate in an
"informed consent" process when they:

go to the doctor for the more than 100,000 available prescription drugs; go
to the pharmacy for the more than 350,000 over-the-counter medications; use
alcohol, nicotine or caffeine; are exposed to thousands of chemi-cals,
compounds or impurities in commercial and industrial products found in:
insecticides, herbicides, food additives, cosmetics, household chemicals
and industrial chemicals; misuse and abuse the dozens of controlled
substances out there. Don't get me wrong here. Drugs are wonderful tools.
I'm grateful for pain medications on a regular basis. However, like most, I
have also experienced serious complications from using both
over-the-counter and some prescribed medications.

But a drug is a drug is a drug. All drugs can be dangerous for some people.
A person can have an allergic reaction the first time they use a drug or
the hundredth time. The basic guidelines developed by the DCSE curriculum
evaluate a drug for its risks before using it, teach how to determine if
one is having problems, and how to de-cide when/where to seek help if needed.

A result of my efforts to become really informed about drugs was to form
the organization Mothers Against Misuse and Abuse (MAMA) with a mission to
educate about drug consumer safety.

The Price of Paying Attention Those of us who want youngsters to avoid
problems with drugs might want to look at our own drug use. Ask yourself:
does my behavior teach that all drug use choices are serious decisions,
requiring careful consideration? Do I use drugs excessively and exhibit
unacceptable social behavior? How do I help my kids evaluate the
drug-taking behavior they observe in others; friends, classmates, family
members and other adults?

While I felt we had found an excellent way to teach our youngsters about
all drug use, it became increasingly hard to explain the law to them. I was
seeing increasingly harsh efforts toward the prohibition of marijuana. The
government had taken to spraying poison on marijuana crops. Marijuana,
which I knew from personal experience was relatively mild when compared to
alcohol, carried penalties for simple possession that were Draconian. I was
astonished that the government would go so far to supposedly protect our
citizens' health from marijuana use, yet use the taxes from the sale of
other drugs with dangerous health effects (alcohol and tobacco) to provide
basic services.

As my children grew up during the eighties, these laws became more and more
severe. Not only would people go to jail for merely possessing small
amounts of marijuana, but they were denied jobs and had their personal
property taken away, even their homes. Then I got a phone call from a
crying woman whose children had been taken from her because she cultivated
three marijuana plants. Her call was followed a parent and drug policy
reform activist with a 20-year history, I am especially well-prepared to
discuss this issue. But my enemy is more familiar than unknown foreign
terrorists. My enemy declared war on me and my fellow citizens. My enemy is
Drug Prohibition, and the crime and suffering it causes, and sadly, my own
government is waging the war.

How can we stop this terrorism and develop drug policy designed to protect
the health and welfare of our citizens? It will not be easy breaking away
from the vast amount of money in the drug war industrial complex. Beside
the money involved in the jail building, staffing and maintenance, the
court system, and electronic monitoring, there are so many other political
and economic interests with a stake in the status quo. There are the drug
makers and sellers, drug-testing companies, drug treatment industry, even
phone companies, which callously make excessive profits on jail phone calls
to and from the literally millions of people incarcerated over the years
for drug-related "crimes".

We can begin to make a change, though. We could start by:

Judging all drugs by the same scientific standard; Educating people to
evaluate a drug to reduce the risks; Providing accurate scientific
information and teaching people to recognize if they are having problems
and where to seek help; Teaching people the skills they need to find
happiness in life, such as adult literacy, parenting skills,
decision-making skills, anger management, etc. Using tax dollars collected
from sale of drugs for prevention and treatment on request for those who
have problems. I would like to believe that logic will prevail, that we
will analyze our national drug policy and make these kinds of voluntary
changes to better protect the health and well-being of our citizens, rather
than lining pockets of corporations and giving so much power to
politicians. But experience tells me these changes will not happen quickly,
even though we are starting to see other more enlightened countries leading
the way.

Faced with the current situation, parents are best able to protect their
families by educating themselves, using critical thinking skills for their
own decision-making, and setting a role model their children are proud to
emulate.

My own children report that the process we DARED use to teach them about
drugs has served them well. They are responsible and involved members of
the community, both considerate and respectful, and the loving, trusting
relationship with them that I so value is very strong.

Sandee Burbank works to bring common sense to public policy in a variety of
ways. As Director and founder of Mothers Against Misuse and Abuse, she has
worked for 20 years educating about drug use and advocating for drug policy
reform. Sandee's hands-on approach has involved her in recreational
planning, foster parenting, parent education, ecological conservation
efforts, and legislative issues. Media coverage, including national
television and publication stories regarding her work with MAMA, helped
gain her international recognition and national and state awards.

Sandee can be reached at mama@mamas.org.