In Lesson Three of the Elementary Curriculum we help students:

• understand the role of advertising in promoting tobacco use
• develop basic knowledge of the harmful effects of marijuana
• compare and contrast the harmful effects of marijuana and tobacco on the body

The DARE Officer will facilitate a discussion and guide the students towards drawing their own conclusions regarding the impact of advertising on the sale of tobacco.

We start off the lesson by reading and answering questions from the DARE Box. We then have a “pop quiz” review of last week's lesson.

The DARE Officer will lead the students through a discussion about advertising, asking questions like:

• Why do companies advertise their products?
• Who pays for the advertisements?
• Why is it so important to get new customers?

We will facilitate a discussion that goes much like this:

Without new smokers, the companies would go out of business due to lack of money. Consider the health fact discussed in the last lesson, 45,000 people a year in Canada die due to smoking! That’s a lot of customers! Consider the price of a package of cigarettes, say $10.00. Take a pack a day smoker, that’s 45,000 people times ten dollars. Now that’s a lot of money that tobacco companies lose out on each year because some of their customers are dying!

Where do you think they will get their new customers? These companies are very clever in the way they make the tobacco product look appealing.

The DARE Officer will show examples of advertisements and lead the students in a discussion about how the information is packaged. Advertisers know how important friends are to us, so they use people who look like our friends, or who could be our friends in their ads.

We ask:

• How are tobacco companies trying to get us to smoke or use tobacco with these advertisements?
• What are these companies trying to tell us with these advertisements?
• How does this information compare to what we have learned from our health facts and warning labels?
• Why did advertisers place the warning label where they did on the page?

For those of you reading this, think about it when you are looking at a tobacco ad, where is that warning label? What colors did they use in their ad? How did they package the information in that ad? What is a “light” cigarette anyway? How would you describe the models in the advertisement. Young? White teeth? Beautiful complexions? Laughing and leaning in to their friends as they socialize and visit......what age group do you think they are targetting?

I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful neighbour who was able to provide me with ads from the 1980's, one of them being the Marlboro Man, remember him? Well, I show this ad to the students, we talk about the ad and how this man is portrayed. I then read them a short news clipping that talks about the day the Marlboro Man passed away from lung cancer.

By the way, when you are looking for the ads, you will have to look in American magazines.

Anyway, back to the lesson. Once we have examined tobacco, we put their new knowledge to work. Using the Dare Decision Making Model, we focus on the define and assess steps of the model when we work our way through “Tobacco Situations”. Here they will find kids their age who need some quick solutions. As DARE teams, we ask the students to help them decide what they should do. We have the teams provide the choices they came up with for each situation and ask why they chose that answer.

We then talk to the students about another smoke - marijuana. The students work in pairs as they read the marijuana fact sheet and complete the worksheet. The fact sheet covers the following information:

• Smoking marijuana causes breathing problems.
• Marijuana users have more colds and upper respiratory problems.
• Marijuana affects your brain and body. Examples are:
  • short-term memory loss (imagine studying for a test?)
  • loss of the ability to concentrate (imagine doing a novel study, or math)
  • slows coordination and reflexes (imagine playing hockey, soccer, baseball, figure skating, lacrosse, motor sports, skateboard park)
  • affects your ability to judge distance, speed and reaction time (imagine riding a bike in St. Albert and trying to cross a busy street)
• Marijuana can be addictive
• There is more tar in marijuana smoke that in tobacco smoke.
• Marijuana users have an increased risk of cancer.
• Marijuana smoke contains 50-70 percent more of some cancer causing chemicals than tobacco smoke.
• Marijuana is illegal in Canada.

Should you have any questions about the D.A.R.E. Program do not hesitate to contact me directly at 458-4313 or check out the D.A.R.E. website, www.dare.com.

Thanks for tuning in!

(Lesson Four)