Rocky Herron, a former DEA agent, is convinced that it’s not enough to focus on the supply of drugs; we also have to change the demand.
San Marcos, Calif. — The audience of 35 teenagers shuffling into a classroom at Twin Oaks High school on a Thursday morning does not look friendly. Heads down and dark sweatshirt hoods up, there is barely any chatter. But Rocky Herron is not deterred. Herron, a towering former Drug Enforcement Administration agent and a recently minted grandfather, begins a 90-minute presentation on the dangers of substance abuse. It is not so much a lecture as an offer of sympathy and a call to arms. “Our society is failing you,” he tells the assembled students, almost all of whom have been referred there because they were not on track to graduate from their neighborhood school. “I don’t comprehend how our society is not doing more to protect you from the dangers of drugs and alcohol.”
Rocky Herron spent 31 years working for DEA, and the beginning of his presentation is an attempt to establish credibility. There are pictures of his team burning cocaine facilities in Bolivia and standing next to stockpiles of seized weapons from drug dealers in San Diego. At a certain point, he tells me, he began to wonder about the impact he and his colleagues could have on drug use in this country “if we are only focused on the supply not the demand.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he tells the audience about the drug manufacturers and dealers. “I want them in jail” — but, he adds, “that’s not the answer.” He notes that there were 10,000 drug overdose deaths a year when he started as an agent in 1990 and that now there are around 100,000.
Herron sees himself as a bit of a David in the fight against the Goliath of not only illegal drug dealers but also the media, government, and Big Cannabis, among others. His is not a popular message. Everyone wants to lecture kids these days about racism or gender identity or maybe bullying on social media, but few want to talk to them about staying away from drugs. Even if schools do want some drug prevention, he hears from principals that they “don’t want to hear it from a cop.”
In 2007, he persuaded the DEA to let him spend part of his time on drug education. The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program launched in 1983 was taught by police officers in most school districts in the U.S., but by the early 2000s its “just say no” messaging had had fallen out of favor. Studies found little to no effect of the curriculum on student behavior. And in more recent years the presence of police officers in schools in any capacity was distasteful to administrators and teachers. Many schools did not replace DARE with anything else.
And the ones that did offered a different (some might say mixed) message: “It is clear that just saying no is not sufficient,” Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told NPR in 2023. “We’d like the theoretical perfect: don’t touch a drug — abstinence. But that’s not necessarily the reality for everyone.” She argues that the abstinence programs lost credibility because “a lot of people know others that take marijuana and they are functioning and they don’t see any evidence of ill effects.”
It’s an odd claim, and given the deluge of recent studies about the harmful effects of cannabis on the adolescent brains and the rapid growth in daily use of highly potent forms of the drug, perhaps the experience of more people is starting to match the reality. Herron tries to counter the messages that his audiences are getting about marijuana since it has been legalized: “I know you’re hearing it’s organic, it’s healthy. Some of you don’t even think it’s a drug anymore.” Herron tells them that emergency rooms in the area are seeing an average of about 40 cases a day of marijuana-induced crises — mostly psychosis — per day. New York and other states are bragging about pulling in hundreds of millions in taxes from the cannabis industry, while Herron is out there combatting the positive messages that other adults are sending.
Herron is not naïve. He talks about how his daughters experimented with drugs when they were teenagers. And he tells the kids that many of them may be able to try drugs without any real problems but that in some cases their brains “will want more.”
In 2021, Herron retired from the DEA and was hired part-time by the San Diego County Office of Education to work with middle and high schools. He spends the rest of his time speaking around the country and the world. Kim Bekkedahl, superintendent of the Kuna School District in Idaho, told me she first invited Herron after a child in neighboring district needed to have Narcan administered in a school hallway. This is not an uncommon story. I followed Herron to St. Gregory’s, an upscale Catholic school where he spoke to students in the sixth to eighth grades. The principal there worries about the kids who will attend a high-performing local Catholic high school, which has seen overdoses in recent years.
Herron ends the day talking to 400 kids in the Job Corps program — men and women between 16 and 24 who are learning a trade. Many of them “have already made choices about drugs,” he says. Indeed, some fail their initial drug screening when they arrive, and others are forced to leave if they can’t stay clean. With employers reporting record numbers of positive drug tests in recent years, vocational programs are desperate to get the antidrug message across.
Herron has done over 1,400 presentations since he started. He doesn’t change his message much from one audience to another. All the groups see a video of a DEA team entering a house that is being used as a meth lab, for instance. The agents are wearing hazmat suits with oxygen tanks to protect themselves from the fumes. They find a baby sitting in nothing but a diaper on the floor. Herron mentions the 30,000 substance-exposed infants born each year and shows a video of one violently shaking and shrieking from opioid withdrawal.
The videos pack an emotional wallop for anyone, but some in Herron’s audience take them personally. They have been born with drugs in their system. They have been removed as young children from a meth house. One girl was paralyzed when her father who was high on cannabis and prescription drugs didn’t buckle her into a seat belt and drove into a wall. “It’s not your fault,” Herron tells them all. “Someone you love was not there for you because of drugs or alcohol.”
After each presentation, several kids come up to thank him and share their stories. A young man tells him about his father, an addict who was first homeless and is now in prison, and says he has not gone down the same road. Herron gives him a fist bump and tells him to keep it up. They take a selfie. A girl confides that she was the victim of sex trafficking in Tijuana, drugged from a young age to make her compliant. She managed to get away, but was pregnant at 13. She went to rehab so her baby would not suffer. “Are you tempted to go back to it?” Herron asks. “Sometimes.” He smiles, hugs her, and tells her he is proud.