For me I can tell you honestly that I really had no idea. I mean yeah sure we knew don't drink and drive, doing drugs is illegal but it seems to me all we learned was from a legal standpoint. No one told me that doing LSD could cause brain bleeds into my spinal fluid. That alcohol is caustic and burns everything it comes across in your system at a cellular level. I didn't know that people are willing to lose their children so that they can do drugs instead. I didn't learn that until I had hit bottom in my life and had to start outpatient rehab.

Also there is the belief that I will try it. I won't become addicted. I will only do it at parties. Well he/she has been doing it for a while so it can't be too bad. They just say that to scare us. I will never get that bad. At that age we think we are, to a point, invincible.

Society thinks that the best way to teach our children to stay away from drugs is to tell them they will go to jail. They don't show them the emaciated corpses of the oded crack addict they picked up last night, the drunk they scraped off the tree this morning. The brain dead teenager who oded on ecstasy at the party last weekend. I say march them through. Start educating them young.

I started teaching my 16 yr old at a very young age. He is Bipolar and comes from a long line of addicts, his father is a crack addict and a current user. My son is automatically high risk. He sees and is aware of what it does to lives on a first sight basis. He is reminded regularly of how at risk he is. He has lost a lot of friendships to drugs but hangs in there. We talk regularly. I fear for him regularly.