Effects
Evidence shows the use and abuse of illegal recreational drugs significantly declined during the Reagan presidency. According to research conducted by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, fewer young people in the 1980s were using illicit drugs. High school seniors using cannabis dropped from 50.1% in 1978 to 36% in 1987, to 12% in 1991 and the percentage of students using other drugs decreased similarly. Psychedelic drug use dropped from 11% to 6%, cocaine from 12% to 10%, and heroin from 1% to 0.5%.
Nancy Reagan's related efforts increased public awareness of drug use, but a direct relationship between reduced drug use and the Just Say No campaign cannot be established.
The campaign drew some criticism, including that the program was too costly. It was also argued that the program did not go far enough in addressing many social issues including unemployment, poverty, and family dissolution. Nancy Reagan's approach to promoting drug awareness was also labeled simplistic by critics who argued that the solution was reduced to a catch phrase.
Read more about this topic: Just Say No
Famous quotes containing the word effects:
“Oh that my Pow’r to Saving were confin’d:
Why am I forc’d, like Heav’n, against my mind,
To make Examples of another Kind?
Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw?
Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!
How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan,
Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“The best road to correct reasoning is by physical science; the way to trace effects to causes is through physical science; the only corrective, therefore, of superstition is physical science.”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)