An anti-drug campaign I can get behind...

Edit: left out the link: http://www.myspace.com/heroindiaries

If you've followed the trend in education, we spend a lot of money on anti-drug programs. Programs like DARE, actually place police officers in the schools, where they talk about drugs and how bad they are for you.

And it's never enough. For some reason, kids are still going out, doing drugs. Looking at these anti-drug campaigns, we see one failure after another. The only question is as to the size and magnitude of that failure.

So, why now, am I encouraging yet another campaign?

Well, in all honesty, it isn't really an anti-drug campaign. It is simply a man telling the stories of the cost of addiction in his life - a life that many young teenage boys dream about.

I'm talking of course, about "The Heroin Diaries". Listening on the radio, you can hear the soundtrack to the book - but the book itself is much more potent - and gets at the real reason why these campaigns fail -

We are so busy creating reasons not to do drugs, that we loose the obvious truths associated around drug use.

Because, in the end, the truth is most drugs are not nearly as harmful as a Dare officer might point out. Even still, if we look behind the scenes at some basic realities, there is so much to say that doesn't require exageration.

Kids are smart, and sometimes, maybe all they need are the facts without the preaching.

So, more power to the Heroin Diaries - which I believe will do more to keep kids out of a very dark world than all the rhetoric about drugs are bad for you...