II: Meeting social needs:
Peer Pressure
Peer pressure can be overcome in many ways when a child has a solid threshold of resistance, i.e. normal resistance to screwing up by using drugs. The job of parents and educators is to increase the threshold of resistance , to help their kids to avoid messing up their lives with drugs. They can help by making sure that their child has some successes in his or her life. This includes successes in making friends and successes in other areas. It makes little difference just what these successes are.
Isolation
We are far more technologically advanced than our parents and grandparents. Scientifically we’re ahead of most of the rest of the world. But in the process of becoming mechanized and computerized, we have lost a great deal socially. We‘ve become terribly isolated and lonely. Because families have become much smaller we have less interaction with brothers and sisters. We spend a great deal of time in our automobiles, usually alone, with windows up, with no contact with other people. Our schools have become so big that kids often get lost in the crowd afraid to reach out and make friends and no one even notices.
Because of fear, many old men and women and others are afraid to leave their houses. Millions of families are uprooted every year when fathers or mothers are reassigned to work in some other part of the country. Divorces divide families that already have little of the old extended family culture and structure. Millions of people desperately need love and friendship.
Is it any wonder that so many young people turn to drugs the group of drug users who pretend to offer the community and the friendship that the young person so badly needs?
So what can we do? Well, everybody can do something about this one. We can start hugging our kids again. We can arrange to have our kids spend some time with other kids that they like. — go roller skating with a group of kids over the weekend — invite them over for cookies — teach them how to dance, or learn how to dance with them. Have them learn how to play a social instrument like a guitar.
There must be a million ways to help build relationships. Never let a day go by in which you don’t stretch to practice the courage required to bring yourself closer to others and others closer to each other. This is important. We have to brand it into our brains. In the rush to raise our standard of living, we have forgotten what real quality of life is all about. A family with debts out the ears in a rented apartment can have much more quality of life than the successful professional living in 5000 square feet in the best part of town. We know this in our hearts. Why doesn’t spill over into our lives?
III. Meeting physical needs:
Any comprehensive program to reduce the demand for drugs must also include plans to deal with the poverty of the inner cities — not giveaway programs — not more welfare, but the right kind of training and education to help people to help themselves.
No more big sweeping solutions, but individual solutions for individuals, small businesses still produce the majority of the new jobs in this country. I know that these are clichés, but they are true.
Talking about solutions, a book that came out a few years ago, “Small is Beautiful,” by Schumacher, still offers the best ideas that I’ve seen on the subject of helping the poor in this country and around the world. Having worked several years in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in this hemisphere, I’ve given this subject a lot of thought.
I don’t feel that I have the answers, but I believe that I’ve seen some things that have a chance of working. Programs that do give results, should be encouraged and taught — not copied — but encouraged in other places.
A project as simple as working on a small garden could have great long term benefits. Learning about soil and how to renew soil through proper care and use of soil renewal techniques under the tutelage of knowledgable volunteers can lead to a lifelong passion for learning more and working toward reclaiming land to feed the population and build soil that will sequester greenhouse gases and help reduce the effects of global warming.
This is not exaggeration or pie in the sky. The only obstacle is doing it. Give away programs don’t work, but programs where people are given the chance or means to help themselves, are the way to go. There’s the old saying about giving a man a fish and he will be hungry again tomorrow. Teach him how to fish and he will be eating for a lifetime.
Dan Hemesath's Blog 
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