Drug Addiction, Drug Abuse, Drug Ignorance

[Baa_Mango]

One thing I have noticed with younger Thai people is that they have fewer inhibitions about some of the harder drugs. For example in my home country a lot of people may smoke cannabis and think of it as soft drug (which it is but I don't want this thread to turn into ignorance contest between the reactionaries and the drug freaks) but would of course consider something like Methamphetamine, or Crack (which I don't think is really a problem in Thailand, but just using it as an example) as very dangerous and hard drugs that they would never even consider being in the vicinity of. This is probably because of anti-drug education and just normal street sense people may (or may not..) receive well growing up. Does Thailand have a drug education, or better yet.. a drug awareness program? I am just asking because it seems like a lot of young (Thai) people here treat a can of beer, some shards of ice, or a joint of cannabis as the same thing. Rich people seem to have this mind set more than lower income people or people coming from lower-middle class families. Is it just because they have money and are young and reckless? Or could it be a normal thing for kids in general growing up...

People remember when Yaa Baa flooded the streets pre Thaksin death squad time... how many people got caught up in that bad news ? Cheap and addictive, I believe a lot of people got caught off guard and caught up in something that they were totally ignorant of. Now I have to really argue against the whole [American..] concept of gateway drugs.. the theory that says smoking a j might lead to shooting heroin because it was fun to smoke weed with your childhood friends. It's kind of accepted these days that the American created DARE program was failure because of the disinformation and outright false statements that were presented to grade 5 and 6 kids. Mostly because after people did experiment with softer drugs and found out that most of the information presented was just false, they started to ignore all of it.

Anyways I guess this is really about drug education here.. (Is there any [real] programs about this?) Would be interesting to have a real thread on this forum, but we can only try right? I know this does not apply to a lot of people here, but if you can not really relate with kids with drug problems, just think of how many of the sex workers are blowing smoke before and during and after work?