Just say no

Just Say No was a campaign promoted and fronted over several years in the 1980s by then US First Lady Nancy Reagan. The campaign focussed on children and young people and was meant to educate them about the dangers of drug use and promote skills to refuse an offer of drugs. The phrase Just Say No became popular and was used simply as an anti-drug slogan. There was widespread adoption of the phrase and it was used in campaigns independent of the Reagan initiative. This was intentional.

There is no evidence the campaign was effective in reducing experimental substance use in children and young people. A 2009 meta-analysis of twenty controlled studies revealed that young people involved in DARE, a Just Say No programme, were just as likely to use drugs as were those who received no intervention and more likely to use alcohol or tobacco products.

Besides being ineffective, the campaign is open to a range of criticisms – including that it was actively harmful.

The perception that all children are being offered drugs particularly in school settings was, at that time and still, not accurate and arguably unhelpful in demonising and misdescribing people who are involved in drug supply (often, themselves, school pupils) and children who use drugs.

The exclusion of mention of tobacco and alcohol, the substances most commonly used in this group and most harmful to this group, seems perverse and sustains misunderstanding about the nature of substance use and the risk involved.

The ‘just say no’ message perhaps led to a belief that people who used drugs and people who developed a drug problem did so because they had ‘just said yes’. This perception leads to a misunderstanding of the causes of problem drug use and to stigma (see lifestyle choice). An argument that people who developed a drug problem are simply people who ‘just said yes’ is difficult to sustain and unhelpful.

In treating all substance use as something to be avoided, the campaign closes down discussion about risk, harm and harm reduction and so may be framed as an anti-education campaign. People do not emerge from such campaigns more knowledgeable but arguably less knowledgeable.

The fact that Just Say No’s emphasis on harm contradicted the personal experience of young people who had used drugs and had (at least some) positive experience or had experienced nothing that they perceived as harm, meant that the whole message was rejected by the very young people who might otherwise have been prioritised as a target audience for drugs education – i.e. young people who use drugs. It is arguable that this undermined all subsequent attempts to engage and educate this group of potentially vulnerable people about issues around drug use.

All of these criticisms can be made of the subsequent UK based campaign that influenced schools-based drug education for decades even after the Just Say No slogan became tired and disused.