Recently there has been controversy about the “scared straight” methods used in school. The case that started all of this was the deception at El Camino High School in California. The high school was shocked when police came into classrooms and announced that multiple students had died at the hands of drunk drivers over the weekend. Students were then told later that it was a hoax, and the missing students returned to class, but many of the students felt taken advantage of. All too many think that this playing on their emotions was not fair, and it brings up the question, how much is too much fear?

In my thirteen years in the public school system, I have been subject to many attempts to force fear into my classmates and myself. While I have never been hit this hard, by taking out my own classmates, I have seen extremely gory crash scenes, morgue images, police reports, and the like all in the name of prevention. Considering that after viewing things like that some of my classmates STILL decide to drink and drive, maybe it is time to resort to these types of methods.

The biggest problem in my eyes is that people don’t think that driving drunk can really hurt you. Too many kids think that driving with only one drink in your system means nothing is going to happen to you. Others just figure that they won’t drink enough to warrant a designated driver or have no one they feel comfortable enough to call when their driver falls through. How do you get them to realize that? I don’t know.

I don’t drink, but if I did I was lucky enough to have a nonjudgmental driver. My grandfather one day told me that no matter what situation I was in I could call for a judge-free ride home. While I have never used it, it is something I highly recommend offering to your kids or grandkids, because not everyone is like me. What keeps me dead set against drunk driving, and why I wrote this post, was a mock funeral I saw once. It was one of these “aversion” videos that we saw in class one day. They “killed” the students by a drunk driver. They pulled together everyone important in the lives of a few teenagers. They held a mock funeral and parents, friends, and others eulogized the students. They then went to the morgue, saw bodies, and realized that everything left them: college, friends, you name it.

Now I think that teachers and activists’ groups should do whatever it takes to get through, be it mock deaths or whatnot. If you do have a teen, please talk to them, let them know that buzzed driving is drunk driving, and it you have the courage and the strong stomach, watch an aversion video with them. The video below is a relatively mild video, but if you want some blood and gore (and I mean blood and gore) go to YouTube and search for “Drunk Driving = Death” it is a video created by Grim Realities, and it is too gruesome for me to post here.

The final message in this post? Please parents, talk to your children about drunk driving, it is a real problem. The school will try, but as the California case shows, the programs are not always effective. Don’t wait until college either, the parties start in high school.