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October 22, 2014

Utah Considers Putting 'Fight the New Drug' Talk on Curriculum

TAYLORSVILLE, UT—The Salt Lake County school district is currently engaged in an anti-porn pilot program in conjunction with the people from Fight the New Drug, whose message to kids and adults is that pornography is by nature addictive and has to be treated with a zero-tolerance policy. The program is being considered for expansion, and may even be officially added to the curriculum. Local CBS affiliate KUTV attended a Tuesday assembly for teens at Taylorsville High School put on by Fight the New Drug co-founder Clay Olsen, himself a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints who founded the anti-porn non-profit in January 2010 with fellow Utah State University graduates. "The co-founder of FightTheNewDrug.org started his talks at schools nationwide after he says he saw pornography's dark side first hand in his own family," wrote Heidi Hatch for the station. "He told the teens that his 'cousin struggled so severely [with pornography] that he actually served a prison sentence that rocked our family.' "Without giving specifics," she added, "Olsen mentioned a scary trend of violence in online pornography. He said of all the porn online, 88 percent contains physical violence most often to women. Olsen uses research to show kids what could happen to the wiring of your brain if you become addicted." And therein lies the rub. Olsen, as AVN noted when he started his site, purports to base his contentions on verifiable science, but in reality the science is anything but definitive, leaving Olsen to essentially spend his time at these assemblies lying to the students sitting before him. "Kids filed into the assembly Tuesday whispering and giggling, even a little nervous," reports Hatch, "but a few minutes in, co-founder Clay Olsen had the kids eating out of the palm of his hand. He started by asking the kids to raise their hand if they had a brain and if they were looking for something to control it. "He ended saying, 'If you don't remember anything, please remember porn is addictive, it kills love and hurts relationships.'" One junior in attendance responded to the message by telling the reporter, "I didn't know how it could harm relationships and stuff, new to me." He added later, "I don't think parents want to talk about it and kids don't want to talk about it either." But Olsen surely does. According to Cosmopolitan, in a piece published today, "Fight the New Drug is an organization at hundreds of Canadian and U.S. schools that teaches that pornography is addictive and hurts relationships, or as they put it themselves, 'kills love.' The whole thing is presented in a way that really speaks to the youth in a cool and hip way, or whatever (think the anti-cigarette Truth campaign, but for porn)." The goal for this campaign, as for any such campaign, is to extend the message as far as it can go, even onto the curriculums of school districts around the nation. To that end, local and state politicians were also in attendance Tuesday, assessing the talk and people's reaction to it. Salt Lake County Council member Aimee Winder-Newton, who is a big fan of Fight the New Drug—"Because they take it not from a moral and religious aspect, but how it effects the brain society and relationships."—nonetheless told Hatch that "the program is not guaranteed to make its way through area schools. They are gauging public opinion, seeing how kids and parents react, and taking that back to their chambers to discuss. Taylorsville parents were invited to an open meeting at the high school on Tuesday night to learn more about the assembly and what their kids heard at school. "Newton said she has not heard of any complaints about the assemblies, only requests for it to come to other schools and cities and to an even younger audience at elementary schools," added Hatch. "Newton said there is no plan for it to go to younger students right now, and that it would best be dealt with at home." Representing state interests, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes was also in the audience Tuesday, "...watching to gauge opinion on whether this assembly should be part of the curriculum." Clearly, Utah is seriously flirting with making the Fight the New Drug message officially its own, but that might be a mistake for more reasons than one. Not only is the science behind their claims questionable at best, but as Cosmo writer Frank Kobola notes, the organization's message of addiction and abstinence is delivered to young people in a consistent tone of shame mixed with a forced appeal to individualism as a way to change personal behavior.   "The problem here isn't the focus," observes Kobola. "I'm sure Fight the New Drug has kids' best interests at heart, and kids do need to know that there's a difference between the sex they see in porn and the sex they see in real life. This is the first generation that's really growing up with this kind of unprecedented access to porn. But functioning in this bubble where the difference between deviant and normal (if you can even find a definitive sexual normalcy) is completely binary is a terrible thing to do to kids who are already weirded out and confused at their newfound sex drives. Teach kids about healthy sex and love, sure, but don't make them feel terrible for having urges or curiosity." Sure, that sort of rational and age-appropriate response sounds awesome, but it also sounds kind of accepting and open, and as Olsen and his Fight the New Drug team have long-since learned, fear—like sex—is what really sells!  

 
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