THE TRUTH ABOUT DRUGS
MULTIMEDIA EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS

Drawing on 25 years of experience in drug prevention, the Truth About Drugs program has solved the problem of effectively communicating to teens and young adults the reality of drug abuse, individually and through mass communication.

Both experience and surveys show that teens and young adults are most likely to listen to their peers. Thus the core message is provided by young people—some of whom have gone down the path of addiction and survived to tell the story—who speak to other young people in booklets, public service announcements and a documentary film.

The cornerstone of the program is a series of 13 fact-filled booklets that, without scare tactics, inform about drugs, empowering young people to make their own decisions to live drug-free.

The series consists of an overview booklet and one booklet for each of the most commonly abused drugs:

• Marijuana
• Alcohol
• Ecstasy
• Cocaine
• Crack cocaine
• Crystal meth

• Inhalants
• Heroin
• LSD
• Prescription drugs
• Painkillers
• Ritalin

Each publication describes how the drugs work and the mental and physical effects they create. Reinforcing these facts and statistics are firsthand accounts from former users telling about life on drugs. The booklets dispel myths by presenting the facts about the effects of each drug, both short-term and long-term. They have been translated into 17 languages and distributed across 188 countries.