From “just say no” to just say nothing: 5 Questions for harm reduction educator Rhana Hashemi

Hashemi discusses her approach to drug education and what students want to know about psychedelics.

As a 13-year-old, Rhana Hashemi got curious about mind-altering substances. She’d read about them in books like Go Ask Alice, and by the time she was in high school, she knew upperclassmen who were drinking and doing drugs. At school, adults taught students that drugs were bad, that they scrambled people’s brains. Hashemi wondered why her peers kept doing drugs if they were really so awful. “I came to the conclusion that adults were lying to me,” she says. She began experimenting with alcohol and cannabis, then tried other drugs like Xanax and ecstasy. Several classmates had started abusing opioids, and eventually overdosed.

Hashemi went off to college, and in her junior year, she transferred to U.C. Berkeley. The first Friday night of her first semester there, she noticed multiple ambulances outside of her dorm, and learned they were there to treat students with alcohol poisoning. In that moment, Hashemi says, a realization hit her: she and other young people had been systematically denied information about drugs, and her friends and classmates were dying as a result. 

Later that year, Hashemi founded the U.C. Berkeley chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and began researching drug education. After graduating with a degree in social welfare, Hashemi helped the Oakland Unified School District launch a new drug education program, and earned a master’s in community health prevention from Stanford. Hashemi then founded Know Drugs, an organization that helps schools implement harm reduction education programs, and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in social psychology at Stanford. The Microdose spoke with Hashemi about her approach to drug education and what students want to know about psychedelics.

At its height in the nineties, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) curriculum was taught in 75% of U.S. school districts, but its popularity has waned. Is there currently a standard curriculum for teaching students about drugs?

After study after study showed that programs like DARE didn’t work, funding dried up for prevention education. We’ve moved on from “just say no” to just say nothing. 

There’s a mandate that schools must do something about drug and alcohol abuse, but many schools go with the most cost-effective way of addressing that, which is having a zero tolerance policy. There’s very little political will to do anything else; it’s up to schools and districts to apply for grant funding. So what’s being taught right now is all over the place. If schools have a progressive educators, they might download Safety First, which is the nation’s first harm reduction-based drug education program created by the Drug Policy Alliance. Others might create their own content by gathering materials from harm reduction organizations. But a lot of the time students are hearing the traditional message: “drugs are bad, don’t do them.” 

You’ve worked closely with schools and students to implement harm reduction-based drug education programs. What do young people typically want to know? 

The main questions I get are: how do we help our friends? How do we support our friends who are using drugs? Some are struggling with where the line is between experimentation or recreational use and problematic use. We brainstorm together: what are signs of recreational use or social use, versus what are signs of problematic use and misuse? I make it really clear to them that there are some things that are in your control and things that are not, so it’s important to ask for help. I also teach them to figure out what they're using the drugs for, and then help build healthier skills that are non-drug related means of doing that. 

I also get questions like, If I did want to use this drug, how can I be responsible about it? Again, I make this a discussion where I go back to them. We have a conversation about what responsible use looks like. What elements would make an experience lower risk or higher risk? We incorporate what we learned from the Safety First curriculum about drug set and setting. When you are in an anxious mood or you’re with people you don't know, or you're getting behind the wheel of a car, these will all push you into the higher risk category. 

More than anything, I'm not trying to be prescriptive; I'm not providing advice. I teach them how to think about drugs. The goal for me is to not scare them out of drugs, but I want them to respect drugs, and to help them see that these are really powerful substances.

How are you approaching questions about psychedelics specifically? 

I lead with the history: the use of these substances as sacraments, as powerful objects used for ritual and for healing. I explain that the advent of recreational drug use is very recent — within the last hundred years. The fifties were the first time we saw teenagers recreationally using drugs. Now, we're seeing a resurgence of psychedelics being used by younger people, more than ever before. 

If we look at how Indigenous cultures relate to these powerful substances, we see that they were always in containers of ritual. There was a lot of reverence, a lot of preparation. These substances were typically associated with rites of passage, and there was always an elder presiding, because they recognized the harms and the risks of these substances, and they created safeguards around them. Today, unfortunately, we don't have that. Most of us don't have elders that we can be learning about drugs with. A lot of these drugs are criminalized. Young people need to realize that the context of using these substances is really different. And with that change of context, what can we learn from history about how people had relationships with these substances? 

Have you gotten any questions from students that surprised you?

What’s surprised me is the increasing prevalence of ketamine among young people. That’s been a hard one for me; I wasn’t ready for it. It’s been hard to keep up with the media coverage of psychedelics, but that’s had downstream effects for us as educators in the classroom. Several of my students have shown me targeted advertisements they’ve gotten for ketamine. They’re 14 years old. 

What societal changes could facilitate better drug education?

First, I think the conversation around discussing psychedelics is going to require a lot of voices — and I wish there were more initiatives to have those conversations now, while we’re seeing big cultural changes. The same thing happened with cannabis legalization: we changed policy before we changed education, and that left us trying to catch up. 

We also need a lot of adult education and deconditioning from DARE, and the War on Drugs, so we can empathetically connect with young people and their curiosities. We need to be able to just have really casual conversations about this. It doesn't need to be a big deal. When I talk to parents, I tell them to have 60 one-minute conversations rather than one 60-minute conversation. Drugs are already a part of our lives; acknowledge it. That includes substances like caffeine and sugar, too. These conversations need to happen around the dinner table, not just in the classroom. 

In the classrooms, I have this vision that every kid will receive comprehensive drug education in schools. That’s going to require a lot of facilitator training, and we already have a facilitator shortage; there are not many drug educators that can talk about the science of drugs and harm reduction. But my hope is that even if students don’t participate in a formal drug education course, every school has a drug lady: a person that a young person can talk about drugs with, without fear of punishment. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

(Editor’s note: Admissions open Dec. 15 for the second cohort of Psychedelic Facilitation Certificate Program at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. Open to licensed health care and certified religious professionals. Virtual open house on December 7th bit.ly/dei-bcsp)