It is very naive to tell young people not to do drugs or to simply say no and expect to see any results. It is basically easy to set up curriculums to educate students about how drugs lead to a life of despair and failure. It is even easier to create new courses of instruction to help our young people feel good about themselves. But as leaders and educators, we always stop there. As a teacher I know that when you create a vacuum in a child's life, something has to replace it.
Nothing is more disastrous than having nothing in a child's life.
When you take away a means of identity, as drugs have become, you have to replace it with something else. That's where we've falling short. It wasn't always that way. Sure, there were the traditional classes of mathematics, English, and science. The competition in class and in the hallways is the same as in the past.