. . [for] while aversive conditions can impair learning, the removal of those conditions or even their replacement by pleasant ones will not, by themselves, produce learning. Learning is, again, the result of effective, task-oriented activity. Mastery of tasks -- establishing rewarding relationships, performing disciplined physical movements, making music, solving problems, communicating vividly -- results in self-esteem. Self-esteem does not, by itself, result in mastery of tasks.

And it must be said that no solid research evidence has emerged to demonstrate that the self-esteem-building approaches to drug education lead to student mastery of the task of drug refusal. If anything, they produce the opposite result.

It's sometimes helpful to a cause like your own when educators are made aware that the tobacco industry is now the biggest sponsor of sit-in-a-circle-and-talk-about-feelings education. The industry's program is called Helping Youth Decide. Most people by now -- especially smokers -- know how skilled the industry is at pulling the wool over people's eyes. In front of the nation's educators and politicians it's been patting itself on the back since 1984 for the "blank cheque" it promised the National Association of State Boards of Education. Since then four booklets have been issued by NASBE with tobacco money, including one in Spanish and another with the title of Helping Youth Say No, an irony in light of the industry's need to trick children and their parents into saying yes.

The four booklets support a national program of training in clumsy nondirective counseling for mothers and fathers. .. In workshops around the country, with take-home materials supplied free, mothers and fathers are learning how to interact with their children in the manner of the permissive Rogerian therapist: ..

The tobacco industry is picking up the entire tab. .. "in the multi-millions" and "open-ended." [The assistant to the President of the Tobacco Institute] insisted the industry is "serious about helping young people refrain from smoking." (It's a claim that we know cannot be sincere. If a million or more children a year aren't induced to start smoking, the industry goes under.) .. Surgeon General C.E.Koop has written that "The seduction of young people is the very essence of survival for the Tobacco Institute and the cigarette manufacturing companies...”)

Surely the industry must have calculated that investing in a program to persuade parents of the virtues of nondirectiveness will pay dividends to itself. Consider a 1969 study done for the American Cancer Society by Lieberman Research, Inc. Findings suggested that when parents consistently sell abstinence -- whether they themselves smoke or not -- a large majority of youngsters will follow their parents' preachment rather than any bad example. It's to the industry's advantage, of course, to discourage this. So we find the following advice in the first booklet of the Tobacco Institute-NASBE series: "Remember that this technique may backfire if you preach. This approach is designed to help youth explore and develop their own values and morals, to be honest with themselves about how they really feel. Respect their feelings...”

This appeal sells cigarettes, and the industry knows it. The interesting thing, in light of your call, is that it's an approach virtually identical to the affective methods applied in schools by such organizations as Quest and Project Charlie. What worries me about these non-profit groups is not malevolence on their part but a dangerous and extreme degree of naivete. They're playing children right into the hands of the dealers in addictive substances.

Sincerely, 
(sgd.) W.R.Coulson 
W.R.Coulson, Ph.D., Ed.D., Licensed Psychologist, 
Member of Federal Technical Panel on Drug Education Curricula, and
Professor of Psychology and Education, U.S. International University.

NOTE: It is Dr.Coulson's contention that what the evidence shows about drug education, it also can be used to show the same thing about the effects of classroom sex education. [The introduction of Human Relationships Education into Queensland Schools is the worst thing so far to happen to school children. Ed.]