Prevention

Just Say No Redux: The Elks Drug Awareness Program

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Michael Brownrigg. Michael recently received his PhD in US history from Northwestern University, where he studied the relationship between emotion, white masculinity, and capitalism to explain the emergence of an antinarcotic consensus in America at the turn of the twentieth century. 

Elroy the Elk, the official mascot of the Elks Drug Awareness Program (DAP), with an antidrug message from the program’s What Heroes Do comic book.

While in Washington DC for a Community Coalition Conference in 1999, Kent Gade, Director of the Elks National Drug Awareness Program, happened upon a speech given by John Lunt, a former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Demand Reduction Coordinator. As he listened to Lunt address a room of DEA agents, Gade was drawn to the agency’s strategies for reducing substance abuse in American communities. After meeting with Lunt, Gade pursued a formal alliance with the DEA that would provide official “credibility” for the Elks National Drug Awareness Program and “strengthen the program’s affiliations with other groups”—organizations with far superior resources for combating drug addiction such as PRIDE Youth Programs and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Allying with the DEA and affiliated groups, Gade believed, would vastly increase his organization’s informational and material resources and aid in producing more engaging and creative antidrug content. As he put it, “The DEA provides us with excellent materials and dynamic speakers. Our partnership is a tremendous asset to our efforts. The agency bends over backward for us. They are absolutely invaluable to our program.”

The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks was founded in New York City in 1868. Early members sought an exclusive social club where white men could fraternize and indulge in leisurely activities unencumbered by city laws that regulated the hours of drinking and smoking establishments.

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Points Roundtable, “Becoming a Marihuana User”: Carl Hart

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Editor’s Note: This week, we welcome Dr. Carl Hart to the roundtable on Howard Becker’s Becoming a Marihuana User. Hart is an associate professor of psychology and psychiatry at Columbia University and a visiting research scientist at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland. His most recent book, High Price, won the 2014 PEN E.O. Award for literary science writing. You …

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Reflections on Red Ribbon Week

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When my daughter came home from kindergarten talking about Red Ribbon Week, I was delighted. I proudly showed her my collection of red ribbons, proud that a consciousness-raising symbol signifying AIDS awareness had made its way into public school classrooms. No, she explained, this Red Ribbon Week was different. She had never heard of AIDS. This Red Ribbon Week was about drugs. “But,” she said, “We don’t really learn about them. We just get told “DON’T DO DRUGS!”

When she showed me her Red Ribbon Week handouts, I was bemused by the big red X’s over coloring-book line drawings of wine bottles and beer cans, syringes, pill bottles, and cigarettes. I was mildly amused at her ferocious response to my very occasional glass of wine with dinner in the post-Red Ribbon Week weeks. My own parents were tee-totalers, so I hold on to my increasingly rare social drinking as a form of no-longer-precocious resistance to authority. But as a drug policy historian, I began tugging at the thread of the Red Ribbon.

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