The Day I Had To Explain To My Daughter That I’m Not A Drug Addict
The other day I picked my daughter up and, while driving home, was talking to her about what she’d been doing in school (she’s in the 1st grade). She told me that it was “red ribbon week” in her school and that they’d talked about how drugs were bad. Which was ok with me, until she started telling me about which drugs were bad.
My little girl told me that cigarettes and alcohol were both drugs, and then wanted to know why I did drugs. Because I have the occasional beer at home, I guess.
I find this “mission creep” in the school’s anti-drug efforts a little irritating. I realize that smoking isn’t healthy and, to a much lesser extent, neither is drinking alcohol really (depending on the level of your intake). But the thing is that those activities are legal, yet they’re being lumped in with things like cocaine, heroin and meth. And I have to tell you, it was a little hard to explain to my confused six-year-old that daddy having a beer on Friday night wasn’t quite the same as shooting up a bunch of heroin.
Despite my libertarian tendencies, I’ve always felt a rather benign sense of approval for school anti-drug programs. They were always hokey when I came up, but the overall message was hard to disagree with. But it seems as though times have changed since I went to school, and the message has moved beyond being merely anti-drug to being anti-“things that are bad for you.”
Which is a little more than the public schools need to be doing, I think.
