Students for Sensible Drug Policy is proud to see SSDP alum and drug educator Rhana Hashemi featured in The Microdose, the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics’ newsletter, discussing what young people actually need from drug education.

In the interview, “From ‘just say no’ to just say nothing,” Hashemi reflects on how the failure of programs like DARE has left many schools without meaningful drug education at all. As she puts it, “We’ve moved on from ‘just say no’ to just say nothing.”

That’s a problem Rhana has been working to solve for years — including as part of the SSDP family.

Rhana founded an SSDP chapter at UC Berkeley while she was a student and went on to help develop SSDP’s Just Say Know peer drug education program, which equips young people with honest, evidence-based information and practical harm reduction skills.

Her approach reflects a principle at the heart of Just Say Know: young people deserve more than scare tactics, abstinence-only messaging, or silence. They deserve the information and tools to think critically about drugs, understand risk, support their friends, and make informed decisions.

As Rhana explains in the interview, her goal isn’t to tell young people what to think about drugs, but to teach them how to think about drugs — recognizing both their risks and their power. She also discusses what students are asking about psychedelics, how drug education needs to evolve alongside rapidly changing drug policy and culture, and why adults need to unlearn decades of War on Drugs messaging if they want young people to trust them.

We’re incredibly proud of Rhana and of the many SSDP Alumni who have taken what they learned in this movement and built careers changing the way our society approaches drugs.

Read the full interview in The Microdose:

From “just say no” to just say nothing: 5 Questions for harm reduction educator Rhana Hashemi