Maybe these work somewhere, but we haven't seen it.
Giving a student a brochure or showing a film about tobacco. Having a guest speaker, no matter how dramatic. The prime example of this I remember is a speech (I am not making this up), advertised as "The man without a face". The speaker was a man who had his lower jaw removed as a result of cancer and his speech was about chewing tobacco. Many of the students I spoke with were impressed by the speaker's personality and shocked by his experience. No one I knew quit chewing tobacco. Several said they thought about quitting after the presentation, but, the next day, it was no different. We have never seen a 'one time only' program succeed in reducing alcohol, tobacco or other drug use.
Telling students this will impact their health ten or twenty years from now. Dr. DeMars had this experience
I taught junior high students who were seriously emotionally disturbed. About 40% of the students were already smokers in junior high. After a discussion about the health risk of smoking, one of my students turned to me and said, "I don't care." It dawned on me that he seriously did not care if he died. Many of my students had been severely abused from as far back as they could remember. They had never learned any good behaviors. They had never been to a birthday party because few people could stand them. (For those interested in learning more, click here for a brief description of conduct disorders from our Introduction to Disability Access workshop.) I did a follow-up study at a high school serving adolescents with emotional and behavior problems. By age thirty, 10% of their students were dead. All the students that I taught had bleak pasts and they did not see their future as promising any better. Smoking was something they could see themselves doing in prison.
Dr. Longie works with different groups, mothers in a family literacy program and workers who have been fired several times from tribal jobs, but his experiences were similar
The young people I work with don't look ten, twenty years into the future. It just is not the way they think. In our program, we work with them to set goals and plans, to figure out that if you get paid on Friday and spend all of your money on the weekend then you won't have money for gas to get to work during the week.
