David McElroy

There’s apparently a new fad in drug addiction sweeping the country. Middle school students are grinding a product into fine powder and then snorting it into their noses — as certain older folks might do with cocaine. It has drug warriors all up in arms.

The “drug” in question is a candy called Smarties. They can’t get anybody high. They can’t cause problems of any sort other than the respiratory problems that you’d get from inhaling any sugar into your nose. So why is anyone considering this a “drug problem”?

A story in my local newspaper today quoted a “drug educator” as saying it’s a problem because it shows that kids are willing to try new things. No joke. It’s a “problem” that kids want to try things. A project coordinator with the Shelby County Drug Free Coalition Project Safe Place Programs of Family Connection — I’m not making that name up — had this to say:

“It shows that willingness to experiment and try different things. Later it may not be Smarties. It may be alcohol. It may be cigarettes. It may be marijuana.”

Can’t we just say that some kids are going to act like idiots no matter what we do? Some kids shove Froot Loops up their nose, too, but it’s not considered a drug problem. Can’t we be reasonable instead of turning everything into the modern version of “Reefer Madness“?

Nobody can accuse me of taking recreational drug use lightly. I think it’s a very shortsighted decision to use any recreational drug, whether it’s the illegal ones or the legal one that causes the most real-world problems — alcohol. I don’t use any drugs and plan to keep it that way. But can’t we have a sense of sanity in what we treat as a real threat? There are a lot of problems that face everybody — including kids — but the idiocy of a few kids stuffing sugar up their noses is something for sane parents to deal with, not for drug warriors to wring their hands about.

How long until some school bans Smarties and Pixy Stix? Or has it already happened and I just don’t know about it?

A curious thing happened in Europe 97 years ago this week. Men who had been trying to kill each other suddenly stopped shooting. They started singing together, exchanging Christmas greetings and giving one another presents. But when the authorities from their respective governments got involved, they had to give it up. They were forced to go back to killing each other.

Human societies spend a lot of time and effort to keep a tiny minority of people from hurting and killing each other. Governments have elaborate systems of police and courts to protect most people — who just want to be left alone — from that tiny minority. But when politicians get angry with each other across borders, they expect something quite absurd. They expect people who want to live in peace to suddenly hate other people enough to kill them. The desire for peace is a hard thing for the politicians to get out of stubborn humans.

The narrative we normally hear is just the opposite — that humans are so violent and so war-like that society would be nothing but chaos and killing without benevolent governments agreeing to control things. But the evidence suggests that the story is far more complex than that.

The Christmas truce of 1914 was very unofficial. It wasn’t observed in all places. But in the midst of the slaughter of World War I — seen as the Great War to end all wars at the time — British, German and French soldiers spontaneously made temporary peace with one another. They came out of their trenches and socialized. Obviously, the didn’t hate one another.

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For many children, the passing of years is marked by when they got for Christmas. There was the train set when I was 3 (which you see above), walkie talkies and a “spy kit” when I was 9, chemistry set and electrical experiment kit when I was 11, and books for most years thereafter. The things I got seemed to reflect who I was and how the people around me saw me. I wonder how much our childhood gifts shape us?

I’m thinking about this because of different presents I’m seeing for kids around me today. Two contrasting examples stand out, because they represent entirely different approaches, at least in my mind.

A couple of my friends have a beautiful and charming young daughter named Linnea. Among Linnea’s Christmas pictures this morning, there’s a whole series of her with her 36 new containers of Play-Doh. She looks happy, and it makes me imagine all the things she’s going to pull out of her little imagination and bring to life with those little pieces of modeling clay.

A 12-year-old neighbor of mine named Joseph came running over to me excitedly a couple of hours ago to tell me that he had gotten an iPhone 4S for Christmas. He knows that I have an iPhone and he’s told me about wanting one before, so he couldn’t wait to tell me about his.

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