The phrase with which Nancy Reagan will forever be associated came out quite naturally, when the First Lady visited some schoolchildren in Oakland, California in 1982. “A little girl raised her hand,” she recalled, “and said, ‘Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if somebody offers you drugs?’ And I said, ‘Well, you just say no.’”
This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.
Nancy Reagan, who died Sunday at the age of 94, was one of America’s most influential First Ladies, serving in the role from 1981 to 1989. And nothing defined her, made her an icon of a kind, more than her campaign against drugs.
Her passion was fueled by a 1980 campaign stop at Daytop Village, an addiction treatment program in New York City. “I was stunned to find out just how large the problem of drug abuse really is,” she said. And at Daytop she saw “children who were climbing out of the mess that they had made of their lives because of their dependency on drugs.”
After her “Just Say No” tagline caught on, she launched a high-profile, long-lived campaign by that name in 1982, traveling around the US and the world and across the airwaves to promote it. PBS noted, “The movement focuses on white, middle-class children and is funded by corporate and private donations.” She visited rehab and prevention programs and oversaw the formation of thousands of Just Say No clubs in schools and youth organizations, some of which still operate to this day.
Her don’t-do-drugs message, a reassuringly simple balm to a nation’s fears, was widely embraced. It can also legitimately be blamed for a huge amount of human misery.
For one thing, abstinence-only drug education, most commonly delivered in the US in the form of DARE, doesn’t work. It also harmfully ignores the reality that some children and teenagers, no matter how much they are told not to, will take drugs—and if they are denied practical information about how to protect themselves, their drug use is more likely to have tragic consequences.