Have You Herd?

People are sheep. There, I've said it. Society as a whole is a herd of socially trainable sheep that mindlessly go where they're led (with exceptions- sheep have a reputation for being a bit temperamental at times). I guess I shouldn't be surprised that, once again, someone is taking advantage of this. It's hard not to.

If you check your student email and read the mass emails sent out to us, you've read the email about the meaning of the "Happy to Be 93." I have not altered this email in any way except for bolding interesting points.


Several Students and Staff have asked for more information about SADD’s recent Happy to Be 93 campaign. Here it is:

SADD conducted a Social Norming Campaign. What exactly does that mean? Well, Social norming has been used in environmental prevention for many years. Social norming projects are designed by youth to impact youth. It is based on the premise that most people will behave within an established set of norms that are known and expected. So basically we create a slogan based on a statistic. This slogan then gets promoted by handing out items like bracelets, fortune cookies, pencils and t-shirts. This gains the interest of the school and typically the school community really wants to know what it means.

The current slogan (Happy to Be 93) being used at the high school is based on data from the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. When developing a social norming project it is best to use local data however this is not available for prescription drugs. It had been agreed to add questions to this years Missouri Student Survey regarding prescription drug use, but this was not done. So we still do not have any state or local data related to the prevalence of prescription drug use. We were comfortable using national data because Liberty typically follows national trends.

So… now you know. Be on the lookout for our social norming campaign next year!

DON’T FORGET TO WEAR YOUR T-SHIRTS TOMORROW!!

[The counselor signed her name here.]


That was it. Our local school conselor came right out and said it. I had already known that the 93% represented people who didn't use persciption drugs (although I had been under the impression that it was local data). What I didn't know about was the "social norming campaign."

Basically, the people organizing this are doing thier best to send the message that it's not just adults who are against this- it's their peers. After being induced into doing drugs by their friends, the goal is to prod these people back, thinking that it's not popular to use drugs. Can people really not think for themselves? All of this sounds very brainwashy.

To be honest, though, I don't think students (or anyone else) are going to succumb to a statistic. They are the statistic (supposedly, assuming that no one is lying). People aren't going to change until they're ready to. If they weren't suseptible to other numbers, such as how many people die from abusing drugs, this number probably won't do much. Touting a number around isn't going to make it more true.

I'm not for drugs by any means, but... this is the same kind of thing people have been doing since elementary school. Haven't we moved past that yet? People are sheep, but they seem to know what direction they're going.

Ylerecnis,
N